Friends groaned when it came time for me to move and they had to hoist those boxes of old Trouser Press magazines I’d saved: Was I really moving them again?
Well, yes. From the late ’70s until 1984, the plucky magazine was an invaluable guide to not only the best of classic British rock, but a window to the emerging bands in punk, new wave, and the American indie music scene. Sharper, more thoughtful and centered exclusively on music, even the title of Trouser Press was a wink to Anglophile rock fans—it was lifted from the name of a Bonzo Dog Band song. The magazine ceased publication in 1984 after 96 issues, but remained a vital source through a series of Trouser Press Record Guides.
Now on the 40th anniversary of its first mimeographed issue, sold for a quarter outside a Rory Gallagher concert in New York, there’s a big new book collecting its most choice selections, Zip It Up! The Best of Trouser Press Magazine 1974–1984, edited and annotated by its co-founder Ira A. Robbins, who spoke to The Vinyl District in a recent Zoom call.
Why this book now?
With the impending 50th anniversary of the magazine in March 2024, it felt like I needed to do something. It would not do just to let the day pass. And because I’ve got a book publishing company that I’m running now, it seemed like a doable thing, which it hadn’t always seemed before, because I’d always imagined it as something I’d have to sell a publisher, which I felt would never happen.
It makes for a definitive look at the era, with interviews that can’t be found elsewhere.
I would hasten to point out that all of these articles have been available on the Trouser Press website for years, for free, for anybody to read. There was a bit of concern on my part that I was just packaging stuff that was already out there. But I didn’t really want to do a history of the magazine. I’d been over that a bit.
I wanted to pull together what I thought best represents the magazine and put it out there. I’ll agree that a lot of the stuff we did back then, in retrospect, seems kind of bizarre and amazing—that we were able to confront artists on a level that I don’t think gets done very much any more in terms of interviews.
And maybe the artists trusted the magazine enough to provide access?
Well, we had an advantage at the beginning, that when British bands came to New York, we were interested in talking to them, whereas a lot of the music press didn’t care about the bands that weren’t going to matter to a lot of people. Like when the Troggs came to New York, we were like, “Wow, we’re going to meet the Troggs!” Whereas for most other people, they were an oldies band that had “Wild Thing” once upon a time. Why would we be interested in them?
We were very historically geared in our minds, so if a band had a long and interesting story, it didn’t concern us one way or another if they weren’t of current value to a commercial audience. So like Status Quo came through, and we were like “My god, we get to meet Status Quo!” And those kinds of bands. And some of the prog rock bands like Camel. How many people were interested in what Camel was doing?
Remember, in the ’70s there was very little in the way of reference materials about bands like that. Dave Schulps and I—he was one of the three co-founders of the magazine—we had this project that we did which was his idea where we looked at microfiche copies of [the British weekly] Melody Maker going back to the ‘50s, and just started writing down all the musicians that we could find mentioned in the paper, and what bands they had been in and when, and what records they made and stuff.
It was just kind of an obsession of ours. And it gave us a real advantage when we interviewed some of those artists, because we knew who they were. It wasn’t like, “Oh I read the press release and you were in this band.” It was like, “When you played with Johnny Kidd, what was that like?” And they were impressed. So it was a good tool for us.
How do you think Trouser Press fit into the history of American music publications?
America had trade magazines, like Billboard and Cash Box, but they evolved in the ‘60s as much more robust pop magazines, which America didn’t have until Paul Williams started Crawdaddy. We had 16 magazine, and Hit Parader, Song Hits and things like that.
I always remind people not to under-estimate them. Hit Parader actually, and 16 to an extent, did have actual coverage in among the “Is Davy Jones Getting a Haircut This Year?” articles. I remember reading, I think in Hit Parader, an obituary for the drummer in Booker T. & the M.G.’s. It’s hard to explain how that fit in with “Is Donny going to leave the Osmonds?” but it was there.
When Trouser Press started, was the model more like Crawdaddy, because it was by necessity small scale and mimeographed?
I wouldn’t say it was modeled after Crawdaddy in terms of the production values, but I would certainly say it was modeled after several publications like Crawdaddy in terms of how we saw music journalism. It was also Zigzag and Let It Rock. And The Rock Marketplace had a big impact on us, and Bomp! in LA—fanzines. As for the mimeograph, I actually came from a leftist political background, and we always had a mimeograph machine in my house.
When did it change to become a glossier publication?
In 1977 we made this big leap to go full color covers and to go monthly. Because we’d been a bimonthly. I kind of worked it out on paper that if we published twice as many issues we’d make this much more revenue which we could then put against the kind of printing we needed to do. So it just kind of worked. It was ’77—the Jimmy Page issue, number 21, the three-part interview that Dave Schulps did with Page.
That’s quite a piece.
It’s amazing, isn’t it? If you read the introduction, Page was apparently barely alive and whispering. It was 4 o’clock in the morning and seemingly not alive at all, but there he was, remembering the details with extreme accuracy, and arguing subtle points over that happened and what didn’t happen. Incredible.
That year, 1977, was also an important one for music. Was that partly the reason for your expansion as well, to cover this new explosion of music?
It was coincidental. Look, it’s 1977 and who did we put on the cover? Jimmy Page. But soon after that, by number 23, I guess we were doing Bryan Ferry, and 24 was Elvis Costello. And 22 was the Pistols. So yeah, it impacted us greatly. But the decision to do those things was not in my recollection related to what we saw going on in the music world.
Could you tell at the time music was changing? Or were you still covering heritage artists as well?
We were. But we were somewhat influenced by the British weeklies and their sardonic surliness and their disrespect. So we started calling the icons that we were writing about boring old farts. Ray Davies is such an unbelievable talent and has made so much incredible music that for a 25 year old kid to call him a Boring Old Fart—he was like 40 at the time—is really sad, snobby, obnoxious, and regrettable. But we fell under the sway of the British weeklies.
It was clear pretty quickly that things were changing and we loved it. And there were two things happening in our view: The things coming from England and the other was the rise of American independent music—the fact that every town was starting to pop up bands and labels and clubs and magazines and record stores. That was really inspiring to us. It gave us a recharge in terms of what we saw our mission as.
It connected us to a DIY world in America that was starting to grow up and I always thought of as creating an alternative recording industry, with all of the elements that the record industry once had—record stores, publications, radio stations, all of that—there was an entire parallel industry.
We were very inspired by that because it gave us a connection to something—it felt like we were part of something, rather than just covering it, because we were taking advertising from these stores and these bands, we were reviewing their records, we were very much in the mix. And eventually, when we wised up we started doing three Local Scene reports every month. We’d just find somebody who was on the local scene and say: Tell us what’s going on in Milwaukee or what’s going on in Boise, Idaho or what’s going on in Spokane.
That stuff turned out to be really valuable, because it allowed us to give coverage to things that would otherwise have been too small for us to notice. We didn’t have the ability to cover all those things, but it was nice. It really added up to something. I think we got a lot of people writing who hadn’t been writers before, and got coverage for artists and stuff. Even before bands had records out, we were able to write about them, which was cool, so I appreciated that.
What would you say was the commercial height of Trouser Press?
We always said our top circulation was about 60,000. I can’t vouch for that being completely accurate. But that’s the way we saw ourselves.. We had 10,000 subscribers, sometimes a bit more, which was helped a lot by having the flexi discs in the magazine for subscribers. That was a big thing for us. But 10,000 subscribers was great. That really kept us going for a long time, because of renewals and things like that.
What kind of things did you have on the flexi discs?
It was kind of great. I think we did R.E.M., we did Orchestral Maneuvers, we did Joan Jett, we did Holly Beth Vincent. We did the Buggles. We did Human Switchboard. Bill Nelson, I think. And this band out of Kansas called Fools Face.
It was this amazing idea that I stole from a British magazine called Flexipop. They scotch-taped them to their front covers; we found that you could bind them into the magazine. But because we were distributed on newsstands, we didn’t want to waste copies going to newsstands that were going to be pulped, because the flexi disc added a substantial cost to producing the magazine. So we couldn’t see paying for 50,000 or 60,000 or 70,000 or 80,000 of them and having 30,000 of them end up in the trash.
So we limited it to subscription copies. Somehow our printers were able to do the complexity of binding them into certain copies and mailing them out. It’s incredible that stuff would work, but it did. We would send the tapes down to the pressing company in Florida called Eva-Tone. They would ship the Flexi Discs to the printer, the printer would bind them into the subscription copies and mail them out for us. It worked.
And there were rarities on there.
Yeah, some of them were, for sure. Basically, we went out to record companies and asked them to fund it, and they could pick whatever track they wanted. And usually it was a plug track from an upcoming album but sometimes they would give us something cool that you couldn’t get elsewhere. Some of those things, I guess, are pretty rare if you look on Discogs now. They’e worth something.
Are old copies of the magazine rare as well?
The very early ones are, because we didn’t make very many. The later ones? It’s funny. I see them on eBay sometimes, for $5 -8 is pretty standard price for an issue. But occasionally I’ll see one that isn’t particularly rare for like $30 or $50, because someone is just guessing.
But the early issues don’t trade very much, because there aren’t many out there. We only did 275 or 300 copies of the first issue, so most of them are probably lost by now. Though I suppose someone could reproduce them pretty easily.
You know, when Sniffin’ Glue was coming out of England, it was xeroxed and a record store in New York would be xeroxing their own copies and stapling them and selling them without paying Sniffin’ Glue for them. That’s what happens when you do a Xerox magazine—they’re really easy to bootleg.
It seemed the magazine ended abruptly in 1984 after 96 issues. What caused it to end?
It wasn’t abrupt for me. I spent a year thinking about it and planning it. The reasons were manifold. It was a combination of things. The predominant factors of which were age, personal lives, boredom, a bit of alienation about the music we were writing about. We just weren’t enthusiastic about Duran Duran as we were about The Clash.
We were kind of aging out at that point. I’d turned 30 that year and a little tired of being broke. We were running a small business that made no money. And the magazine was actually running out of money as well, which was a separate problem. We were having trouble making our bills. It was a lot of factors.
And then the really odd thing was the rise of MTV, because of the kinds of videos MTV was playing and who was making videos in those days, which were primarily British pop bands. They were showing a lot of the bands we were writing about that were like the extension of where we knew we wanted to go in terms of genre. And they were playing them as if they were a national radio station
They were giving exposure in a much more visceral way that we could. We could write about a band and interview a band, but they could literally have them in the studio, talking and playing their music and show them on stage. Ok, we can’t do any of those things. It felt like our uniqueness was somewhat compromised. Our claim for being the place to go to read about those bands was starting to seem like: Why would you do that? Who needs us anymore?
And that’s not in any way a criticism of MTV. They created a lot of great careers as a result and put a lot of music on the map and really shifted the direction of music in America for a while, and more credit to them for that. But they kind of pushed us out of the way inadvertently. And that was one of the factors.
Trouser Press existed entirely in a time of vinyl. Do you think you would have embraced over formats had you stayed around?
I’m pretty open to formats. It doesn’t really trouble me that much. I find CDs convenient to play, to store and play. I play my CDs more than I play my vinyl, but there’s no replacing the look and feel of an album with the liners and cover notes and things like that. I would never give them up—don’t let my wife hear that.
I still love vinyl, but I have to admit that practically speaking CDs are easier. And mp3s are easier still, but that’s a real trade off in terms of ancillary material and data. It’s funny, I listened to the Beyoncé record on Spotify when it came out, because I was curious. I wasn’t really writing about it or anything but I was just curious, and I really liked the guitar playing on it. It was like: Who’s playing guitar on this record? I don’t have a way to find out. Like, Spotify wasn’t going to tell me.
Is there an upside for streaming?
Yeah, it’s so much easier to fact check now, and to look up covers and see whether this record came out in Germany or not. Or whether it came out in England, and what year. I could have done those Record Guides in half the time if I had Spotify. But of course a lot of those records I wrote about had never been on streaming services. I look at my singles collection and you still can’t hear this stuff.
Zip It Up! The Best of Trouser Press Magazine 1974–1984 is out in paperback and ebook formats from Trouser Press Books.
IMAGES COURTESY OF TROUSER PRESS.
