Articles by Ira Robbins

In the current issue of The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh writes that music criticism has “lost its edge” – i.e., why the default appraisal of almost everything released these days is positive. But beyond observing that a lot of music criticism these days is namby-pamby twaddle (my words, not his), the essay doesn’t get very far in spelunking the question. Ironically, although he does not seem to know it, Sanneh already had one of the answers, and he wrote about it twenty-one years ago.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

A collaboration between Robert Downey Jr. and his dad, “Sr.” is a father-son movie about making a father-son movie, a loving but tentative pas de deux between a cocky superstar who normally doesn’t take shit from anyone and the genial white-haired joker to whom he naturally defers.

A new documentary turns a much-needed spotlight on a band whose many hits are suffused deep and wide into the soil of American music, but one that has long been taken for granted, underrated even. Ironically, the bludgeoning familiarity of John Fogerty’s Creedence songbook has had, with time, the effect of obscuring the diversity and economy of his amazing creative run through the Woodstock era.

With Pavement on the road again, here’s a 1997 profile of the band by Ira Robbins.

Shot by Barbara Wolf on Super 8 from an orchestra seat at Madison Square Garden in NYC. Don’t know which one of the four shows it was. These three reels have been sitting in a box in a series of closets for 48 years, and I just thought to have them digitized. For more Who…

Nell Davies is a singer, songwriter and guitarist from rural Cornwall. Already in her 40s, she started making music in late 2020 after reading Viv Albertine’s memoir inspired her to buy a guitar and begin writing songs. She records in a converted pigsty and produces herself. “Happy Birthday” is her fourth single.

From 1992: It’s been ages since anyone over the age of 12 expected perfection from a rock’n’roll band, but the members of R.E.M. have managed to become Genuine Rock Gods without making a public nuisance of themselves.