Bill Sassenberger is one of the great figures of American punk rock – not as a musician, but for doing just about everything else one can do to support and advance the music, the ethos, the spirit. In his Southwestern stores and his label, he has offered a lifeline to countless bands and fans. As he loved it so he has lived it — for more than 50 years.
I watched the new documentary recently and found it extremely well-made (if long ). It put me in mind of my interview with Joel, in 1993. He was married to Christie Brinkley, in court with his former brother-in-law and promoting the River of Dreams album, which I didn’t much care for. But Billy was far more charming than I expected: oddly self-deprecating, a funny mixture of pretentious and offhand, just like he comes off in the documentary. Even though hating music critics was his default stance, I didn’t feel like an enemy in his midst.
Another Tuneless Racket, a monumental book series of five volumes (with a sixth in progress), attempts to tell the story of the first four years of punk, with opinionated in-depth coverage not just to the well-known bands but also to the scenes and smaller bands that provided the environment in which punk could take root.
In 2022, Trouser Press Books published Rock’s in My Head, a memoir by the fabled LA scenester Art Fein, based on 10,000 pages of journals he had kept. Art died July 30, following surgery for a broken hip. He was 79.
The effect is not of a book being read aloud, but of two enormously likable fellows alternately recounting their shared life story for nine mesmerizing hours. It’s weirdly intimate, almost as if they’re speaking directly to you. And with colorful inflections. It’s fucking brilliant.
Living in San Francisco in the late 1970s, Philip Polarov is a writer scraping by on a series of odd jobs while attempting to turn his self-described “stream of drivel” into an Important Novel. As the last soldiers of the Beat Generation become ghosts in the North Beach neighborhood they put on the map and the Baby Beats, a new clique of their acolytes, take over the bars and coffeehouses, Philip searches for meaning, sex, drugs … and an affordable place to crash.
Saturday, March 16th, Trouser Press will celebrate its 50th birthday – and launch Zip It Up! The Best of Trouser Press Magazine 1974-1984 – with a gala party at Bowery Electric in New York. Trouser Press co-founder Ira Robbins will host.
This interview with Sinéad O’Connor took place at La Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood on June 18, 2007. She was in Los Angeles to promote her eighth album, Theology (which was released the day the interview took place), and to play an acoustic show at the intimate Silent Movie Theatre the following day.
Nuggets has come to be regarded as one of the most essential, influential compilations of the last century. One element that sets it apart, given the era in which it was assembled, is the fact that it didn’t set out to be a greatest hits of anyone or anything. And while the billing as “Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968” suggests that it surveys a particular type of music, that’s not really the case.
A review of “Three Imaginary Boys,” the Cure’s debut album, ran in the Melody Maker of May 12th, 1979, under the headline ‟The Eighties Start Here.” In England, the magnificent fury of ’77 punk rock was already being consigned to cliché: The best bands were off to new stylistic adventures, and the ones they inspired into existence were moving even further afield.
On May 13, 1993, working on a “new faces” assignment for Rolling Stone, I had the occasion to speak with Liz Phair over the phone, shortly before the release — 30 years ago now — of her debut album, an instant classic which became a touchstone for a generation of indie rockers.
“I was always Bun, from the time I was 4. Tom started calling me Bunny in Philadelphia, and that kind of stuck. I made it an initial E. I adopted a stage name so the band didn’t sound like a bunch of Swedes. I changed Carlson to Carlos. If I would have known we were going to be famous I never would have picked Carlos.”
Scott Miller of the Loud Family and Game Theory took his life in April 2013. This reflection and appreciation was written at the time. Augmented with audio excepts from a 1993 interview.
“Performance” has been called a work of art that encapsulates the mood of its time better than many of its contemporaries.
Slade drummer Don Powell shares his personal memories of the band’s many LPs in this exclusive Trouser Press interview.
The first issue of Trouser Press magazine appeared on the streets of Manhattan on March 9, 1974. This is the story of how that came to happen.
Devo has devolved from an active band into Jerry Casale, who would like to continue Devo’s musical legacy, and the Mothersbaugh brothers, who appear happy to let it be. An interview with the band’s visionary bassist.
In late 1975, two Trouser Press writers brought Tom Verlaine of the then-unsigned band Television up to their apartment for an interview. This hour-long conversation has never previously been published. Here, it is accompanied by an introductory essay by the novelist Bruce Bauman as well as audio clips from their conversation.
Paul Gorman’s chronicle of the music press augments his 2001 oral history but again does not bring the story into the 21st Century.
For the past 35 years or so, guitarist Jimi Hazel has been leading 24-7 Spyz, a New York band that plays a fluid mixture of metal, funk, R&B, reggae and rock with both confidence and skill. In 2019, the “heavy metal soul pioneers from the Boogie Down Bronx” returned with The Soundtrack to the Innermost Galaxy, an eclectic style-jumper of instrumental virtuosity, heavy power, upbeat positivity and stirring commentary.
