#707: The other music mags

Back in the day, when ROLLING STONE got too boring or stuck-up, there was always TROUSER PRESS and MUSICIAN to fall back on.
TROUSER PRESS was home for just about anything British, New Wave, or Overlooked. Where else were you gonna find reviews of the newest Caravan album? (Nowhere!) Where else were you gonna learn that National Health was touring America? (Absolutely nowhere!)
At the time I didn't have much use for TP's coverage of Elvis Costello or The Ramones, but TP also ran great in-depth features like The 100 Greatest Rock Guitarists Of All Time (which gave me a renewed appreciation for Al Stewart's lead guitarist Tim Renwick, among others), & 70 Great Lost Rock Albums From The '70s (with wild forgotten stuff like World War 3 and Crabby Appleton and Michael Fennelly, and....)
They also had reviews of hard-to-get import albums, & even singles. They had a small stable of good writers like editor Ira Robbins and Scott Isler and Jim Green and....
The whole magazine was written and put-together with the kind of fanaticism and attention to detail that only real hard-core music fans (who were likely underpaid or unpaid) could bring to the job. It seemed like they did it all out of love.
And just as they were getting really good ... they vanished, sometime in the early '80s.
Some of the magazine's spirit has been carried on in Ira Robbins' TROUSER PRESS RECORD GUIDE, a huge volume of reviews that covers not only New Wave/Punk Rock stuff, but also harder-to-classify acts like Roxy Music, Sparks, The Residents, Can, Hawkwind and lots more. I still don't think I've made it all the way through the RECORD GUIDE, even after all these years. But Trouser Press also has a website where most of the RECORD GUIDE's reviews are carried and updated (at www.trouserpress.com/). That's where you can learn that Hawkwind has released something like 85 albums over the years....
The website's not the same as the old magazine, of course, but what is?
While TROUSER PRESS was fading away, MUSICIAN was coming on the scene, & for about 10 years I thought it was the very best music mag around. MUSICIAN started out being completely devoted to jazz ... but it slowly expanded into covering more popular artists -- first Miles Davis, then Steely Dan, then long pieces on Dire Straits and Roxy Music and the Dixie Dregs, with an occasional look back over their shoulder at John Coltrane....
There were always tons of album reviews and some GREAT interviews -- moments like when Steely Dan admitted they stole the tune for their great "Gaucho" from Keith Jarrett's "As Long As You Know You're Living Yours." ...Or when Sting finally admitted that maybe the other guys in The Police deserved just a little bit of credit, too....
All this good content took a ton of great writers -- people like the hilarious Charles M. Young, the great Vic Garbarini, Matt Resnicoff, Chip Stern, Rafi Zabor, Dave DiMartino, Jill Blardinelli, the late Lester Bangs, King Crimson's Robert Fripp, and many more.
When King Crimson hit the comeback trail in 1980, Fripp published his journals about the experience in MUSICIAN (& I would LOVE to see Fripp's journals published in book-form someday). Lester Bangs did a hilarious overview of The State Of Rock as 1980 dawned -- it was called "Rock in the '70s: Where Was It?" ("Synthesizers all over the place! Disco, you trashy thing!") Bangs included a list of The Most Depressing Music Of The '70s -- Miles Davis's GET UP WITH IT and ON THE CORNER were right up there....
Rafi Zabor published the first section of his long and wooly jazz novel THE BEAR COMES HOME in MUSICIAN, then stayed around to write reviews. Chip Stern wrote short, savage, hilarious jazz reviews that showed ABSOLUTELY NO PATIENCE for the frothy lite-jazz that started taking over the spotlight in the '70s and '80s. Charles M. Young once published a long hilarious review covering all the albums he received in the mail in ONE DAY....
MUSICIAN only got better as it turned into the '90s. Features covered everyone from Van Halen to Sinead O'Connor to The Replacements to Laurie Anderson. Dave DiMartino looked over a dozen Can albums in one review and called them The Most Overlooked And Ripped-Off Band In Rock History.
Somewhere in the middle of moving from Turkey back to the U.S., I lost track of MUSICIAN. Then I spent six years in Wyoming, which was almost as isolated as Turkey. The next time I saw a copy of MUSICIAN on the newsstand in 1998, it was a shadow of its old self. All the old writers were gone, and the mag had become a thin, technical, equipment-obsessed mag for Working Musicians. I don't know if it's even still in business.
But I sure miss the old mag....
I didn't have much use for the other music mags. Though CRAWDADDY/FEATURE ran some good stuff, it died early, before I could really appreciate it -- and about 3 months into my subscription. I always thought CREEM was just a little too silly -- which maybe shows I wasn't in tune with their party-hearty lifestyle. HIGH FIDELITY and PHONOGRAPH RECORD sometimes ran some good stuff -- HF had good, long CD-overviews of the Beatles & Stones, King Crimson, Frank Zappa & Todd Rundgren, plus a GREAT piece on Musical Guilty Pleasures. But their reviewers sometimes seemed kind of artificial and stuck-up.
And none of them matched MUSICIAN and TROUSER PRESS at their best. I'd do almost anything to get a complete run of both back in my hands -- especially TP. I miss those old mags. I miss those DAYS....