Before It Was Easy: Ira Robbins Talks Trouser Press’s 50th Birthday
A seminal rock magazine gets an awesome anthology
“We just kind of winged it” says Ira Robbins about the way he and his cohorts kicked off publication of revered rock mag Trouser Press in 1974.
The earliest issues were printed on a mimeograph machine (not even a conventional copier) in his dad’s office, assembled by hand, and sold by Robbins and company outside of concerts. At its peak of popularity, it was nationwide, with around 10,000 subscribers.
Along with co-conspirators like Karen Rose, Dave Schulps, Scott Isler, Jim Green and Jon Young, Robbins created a magazine that became surprisingly influential given its semi-underground sensibilities, becoming a bible for a generation besotted with punk and New Wave (among other things). Along the way, he expanded the TP legacy with a series of equally beloved record guides.
Robbins celebrates the mag’s 50th birthday by lovingly anthologizing its decade-long run in Zip It Up! The Best of Trouser Press Magazine 1974-1984, and he took the time to chat with us about it.
What was your perspective on the music journalism world when you started the magazine?
I was a kid staring in the store window wanting to be part of something that I didn’t know how to be part of…other than doing it myself. I was more interested in the underground version of rock journalism. I was never a Rolling Stone subscriber. I read the British papers as much as I could. That, to me, was rock journalism. My first rock journalism heroes were Nik Cohn and Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches…not really the people who we were supposed to be admiring. Rock journalism to me was like an open prairie, just rave on about stuff you cared about. It was very proselytic in my view.
Rock music in those days was like the be-all and end-all.
How did those ideas influence your coverage?
For me, the stuff that was considered mainstream in 1974 was just awful. Even the bands that we liked that became really famous weren’t really famous when we liked them. Dave [Schulps] and I were Who fans. When we became Who fans in 1968…they were like these British hooligans who broke guitars and everyone kind of hated them.
Our other prime motivation was to write about bands that we liked, mostly British bands that had no presence in the United States media, both bands from the ‘60s and bands from the ‘70s. Our instinct was to reflect our fandom – British Invasion and the good stuff that was happening in England in the early ‘70s, which was sort of an odd hodgepodge of things. We were big on Rory Gallagher and the Pink Fairies and Genesis and Van Der Graaf Generator, it was a really odd collection of bands because there was no codified genre that was happening at the time. It was kind of like a transitional moment.
What do you see as the precedent for what you were doing?
We definitely had an underdog view. The magazines that directly preceded us were, like, Bomp! and Phonograph Record magazine, and the Rock Marketplace and Zig Zag and the British weeklies, those were the formative things for us. We were very much in that mindset that [Rock Marketplace’s] Alan Betrock and [Bomp! founder] Greg Shaw had created, of collector-minded journalism… “Here’s a record you’re gonna need to find.”
How did it feel when you were confronted by the stream of exciting new music coming out in the late ‘70s?
In 1977, every record that came out was great. One new band after another, it was just a flood of joy. “Oh Generation X! Oh, The Vibrators! Oh, The Damned!” X-Ray Spex, XTC, it was just endless, it was great. We sort of started at an odd time, but we had gotten our shit together in time for the good stuff to happen. When punk happened, we were somehow ready for it. We threw ourselves wholeheartedly at it, although not exclusively.
Can you describe the size and state of your early operation?
Our first office was actually a post office box at the Grand Central post office in Manhattan, because we realized we needed someplace to get mail. So, we would pick up our mail on a Saturday morning and have a meeting in the post office to decide what we were doing the next issue. That lasted about a year and a half or so. Now it just sounds bizarre, but in 1976 we rented an office in the heart of Times Square for like $150 a month. And then we moved to a larger office. The first office was basically one room. We had three desks and one phone and we didn’t have a full-time staff.
When did you shift from your original Anglophile focus?
We did Todd Rundgren on the cover of issue 30, but that tells you how long it took. That’s three years into the magazine’s existence before we put an American artist on the cover. Creem’s slogan was “America’s only rock ‘n’ roll magazine,” so we made up our own slogan, “America’s only British rock magazine.” It confused the hell out of people. People thought we were actually a British magazine. But eventually we just kind of outgrew that. Especially as the American independent scene grew up in ‘77 there were bands we wanted to write about that were American. The New York scene was starting to really bubble up and there were punk bands that we really liked and American scenes happening that were exciting, and that kind of shifted our focus.
What were the biggest differences in the dynamics of the music world you were dealing with compared to the present?
One of the great achievements of New Wave was to eliminate the gap between artist and audience. I grew up going to shows at Madison Square Garden, sitting a thousand feet away and seeing somebody this tall [indicates tiny space] playing through a PA. Once CBGB opened, we were standing next to the stage watching people who were like a foot and a half away. That was a big deal in terms of the way we thought about music. The artists became real people. After that it went back to the way it had been. In the era of social networking artists have become accessible again.
In the back of the book are a couple of the survey pieces we did, in which we got comments from all sorts of crazy famous people, I have no recollection how we did that. We put out our first issue and I sent a copy to Pete Townshend, and he wrote me back with a comment on the first issue, which seemed to me at the time unthinkable. He’s my biggest hero in the world and he’s taken the time to handwrite me a letter in response to my little mimeographed magazine. It never happened like that again.
What do you consider some of the magazine’s biggest wins?
The Jimmy Page interview for sure. It was the most in-depth and honest historical interview Page has ever given. It’s become a very foundational document in Zeppelin and Yardbirds lore. Dave Schulps’s preparation for it was incredible. The Robert Fripp interview that we ran very early in the magazine’s existence, a classmate of mine from engineering school did that. It’s so unlike a rock interview. Fripp asks him questions. They talk about stuff that seems way off the topic. Fripp took the interviewer really seriously. It was one of those meetings of the minds that’s rather special. The other one I would point to would be the Devo and William S. Burroughs conversation that we organized. It didn’t really work out the way we wanted it to, we imagined it would get deep into something and they kind of wound up riffing off each other, but it was kinda cool.
And what were some of your personal favorite pieces?
I included a Jim Green piece [in the book] about going to an Elvis Costello show in Belfast, which I stupidly named “Belvis in Elfast.” He had a really weird encounter with Jake Riviera, who was Elvis’s manager at the time, and it’s in the piece. That was a fun one. I wrote this kind of controversial article in 1977 saying that New Wave was over. My contention was that it had been commercialized to the point that the pure impulse of “get up and play and do it for fun” had been overtaken by corporate interests and careerism and bandwagon jumping. Certainly, Schulps’s interview with Townshend is really great; it’s in the book. He goes to Pete’s house and his wife answers the door…She goes, “Hold on, I’ll see if he’s awake.” And she goes upstairs and fetches Townshend, who comes down rubbing his eyes. They had a really good interview though.
What were some of Trouser Press’s biggest challenges?
You read this stuff now and it’s like, “Well I knew that. I saw the movie, or I read the book.” But when we did it, anybody who did it in those days, it was like operating with two hands tied behind your back and an anvil on your shoes. There were no books, there were no movies, there was no Wikipedia, there was no internet. You basically had to do the research the hard way and talk to people and find stuff, and find a clipping file, and do everything you possibly could to get this stuff to make sense in a historical story. You couldn’t just print it off of some website.
What would be an example of the more intense side of your research?
Before we started Trouser Press, Dave Schulps and I did a project that he thought of, and it was nuts, but it was a really great idea. We went to the Performing Arts Library and they had microfilm of Melody Maker going back to the ‘40s. And we started with the early ‘60s and read every issue cover to cover and wrote down the name of every musician that we happened on. We were writing down the names of musicians and figuring out what band they had played in and when, and what instruments they played. So, we were basically building an inverted genealogy artist by artist. We used that to build an index card file of bands.
When we started interviewing artists…we could go in and say, “Oh, you were in this band called the such-and-suches,” and they’d go, “How did you know that?” Because it certainly wasn’t in their bio and it wasn’t something that was widely known, but we had done the work. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with microfilm but it’s physically nauseating to see words go flying by like this, because we were doing a lot of it, so we were doing it fast. It was kind of an amazing piece of technology that would now strike somebody who hadn’t seen it as absurd.
What led to the shutdown of the magazine in 1984?
Once the New Wave moved on, we followed that path into post punk and the New Romantics and the MTV era, which proved to be our undoing. We were not as keen on Adam [Ant] and Duran Duran and Culture Club and Big Country as we had been on The Clash and The Sex Pistols and The Damned and The Stranglers and Siouxsie and stuff. So, our coverage became half-hearted. Three-quarter-hearted, let’s be fair. And we attracted an audience because MTV had built an audience of young kids who were attracted by the colorful bands and the pop songs. And that audience found us but didn’t find our somewhat more sophisticated, cynical, sarcastic view of their music as appealing as what MTV was selling. Eventually we discovered that MTV was doing a lot of what we were trying to do, but with the benefit of having music and video to play. We were getting older, and we were running out of money, and we just didn’t care as much about what we were doing. And it just seemed like a good time to stop.
How did the Trouser Press record guides come about?
I was approached in probably early 1983 by a young editor at Scribner’s who had done one music book and kind of wanted to make that his specialty. He and I had lunch and the idea we came up with was to do a record guide. We thought, given the number of albums that had come out under the New Wave rubric, that it was a manageable amount of stuff. We basically followed the model of the Rolling Stone book, which was basically to go artist by artist and review all of their albums in sequence. The crazy thing is that at the time the book came out in late ‘83 it was pretty close to definitive in terms of what you would call New Wave. After that it became a free-for-all in terms of what was released and what we could cover. That book did fairly well… They came back a couple of years later and said, “Would you do a revised edition?” And we ended up doing five volumes in all, up through the’90s.
Do you find that most people these days identify Trouser Press with the books rather than the magazine?
Unless you’re over 40 or so, the magazine doesn’t exist. A lot of times people don’t even know there was a magazine. That’s been a steady refrain in my life. The books are what people know. We sold a lot of books over five editions.
Maybe that’s an imbalance the new book will help correct.
What I’ve discovered in the last 15 years is that the Trouser Press name has meaning for a lot of different people. A lot more people than we ever knew. One of the really weird ironies has been that when we were doing the magazine, we’d come in and there’d be like three pieces of mail on the floor…. That was our entire contact with the outside world. When the magazine ended it suddenly became something that people knew about and remembered. People heard about it, or their older brother or sister showed it to them or something. A lot of knowledge of the name Trouser Press grew over the years. In my life I’ve been told by far more people than I ever thought read Trouser Press that they read Trouser Press. That’s been really gratifying. And it certainly has given me a lot of impetus to do the stuff I’ve done, like starting Trouser Press Books.
You cast a lot longer shadow than you originally thought.
Trouser Press, to a lot of people, I’ve learned, has a kind of aesthetic significance. It’s a definition of a certain thought about popular music—underdog, independent…all values that I worship in music, and there’s been a real continuity of that thought. We have a message board on the Trouser Press website, people talk all the time about, “Oh, they seem like a Trouser Press band to me, this new group that just came out.” The fact that The New Yorker saw fit to do a story about us, that’s kind of amazing, 40 years after the magazine ceased to exist. It’s really amazing to me how enduring the name has become.
What were your guiding principles in putting the new book together?
I wanted, obviously, to get the high points of the magazine. Otherwise, I wanted to convey the progress of the magazine’s editorial evolution, from ‘60s stuff and what we now call classic rock to glam to New Wave and beyond. And I also wanted to demonstrate that we actually were very open to women writers. There’s a very strong narrative that has grown up that women were very poorly treated in the rock press for many years. Trouser Press was co-founded by a woman. Two out of the six owners of Trouser Press were women. The magazine had female writers from the get-go and I wanted to make sure they were represented, because a lot of the best stuff we ever ran was written by women. I took that opportunity here to make sure the women who wrote for Trouser Press were well represented in this book. Karen Schlosberg; Kris DiLorenzo; Marilyn Laverty, who became a very famous publicist; Karen Rose, who co-founded Trouser Press; Marianne Meyer, Moira McCormick…
What would you like readers to take away from the book?
A taste of what rock journalism was like in the days before it was easy. When the goals were to respond to music that we cared about at a time when that was not the easiest thing to do. And what it meant to be a fan as well as a critic. We weren’t promoting people. We weren’t trying to get people to sell records. We weren’t trying to get on the bus or be friends with people. We took the records that they made really seriously. And our values were that a record that sold 10 copies was every bit as valuable and credible and significant as a record that sold a million copies. So, Half Japanese was as important to us as Duran Duran, and we treated them equally. To us a record by Daniel Johnston was every bit as important as a record by Bob Dylan. We operated outside of commercial considerations.
The idea that just because something is not gonna sell well that devalues it is ridiculous. Creativity is an absolute concept. Commercialism is irrelevant to creativity. It’s not the reason why good art is created. As long as somebody is trying hard and has something to say, I’m interested, and I’m willing to give it as fair a shot, as equal a consideration as anything else. Trouser Press was a conduit for things that had no chance of being heard to people who wanted to hear things that had no chance of being heard. In Rolling Stone, when they wrote that wonderful obituary of us in 1984, they called us “the voice of the pop/rock underground.” That’s as good a description of what we were as anything.
Zip It Up! Is available now from TrouserPressBooks.com
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June 23, 2020 -
Ira Robbins has always been a biased, bad reviewer. His take on The River by Bruce Springsteen convinced me and I’m sure many others of his lack of talent.