Thought you guys might like to read the little speech I made last night...
Trouser Press 40th anniversary
23 March 2014
Bowery Electric, NYC
The story of Trouser Press resembles the story of a band. We met in high school, got things going in college, had fun for a while, involved a lot of great people, made no money, broke up and then got famous.
What began as a whim on a southbound #1 train ended up consuming my life for 11 years. And, ultimately, brought us all here tonight.
Thanksgiving 1973. Dave Schulps and I – besides encountering Bob Dylan in Village Oldies -- hauled ass up to Yonkers for a record collectors hang with a bunch of strangers who, like us, were into British Invasion bands. We weren’t full-on collectors, more like amateur trainspotters, but that got us in. We ended up riding downtown with one of the people we met there, a redhead named Karen Rose, who worshiped Jeff Beck and had edited the Brooklyn College newspaper. By the time we got off the train, the three of us had decided to publish a fanzine. I was 19 years old, and it just didn’t seem like that big a deal.
In creating Trouser Press, we billed ourselves as outsiders – “an alternative to the alternate alternatives” is how we put it in a pre-publication mailer. “We have nothing to alienate anybody – no famous writers, no big names, no money, or anything that might make us elitist (or successful).” Truer words…
Using my father’s mimeograph, a rented Selectric typewriter and a T-square wielded by High School of Art and Design student Barbara Wolf, we pulled together a first issue, with articles to match the March 1974 concert schedule in New York. Our idea was to hawk the mag in front of venues with articles about the bands playing there. So come March 9th 1974, we planted ourselves in front of the Academy of Music on East 14th Street, at a show featuring 10cc, Brian Auger and Rory Gallagher.
The opportunity to rave about music we loved was pretty seductive. And the odd perks – a personal letter from Pete Townshend in response to the first issue, free records, a paid subscription from Gene Simmons – made a future seem possible. In short order, our all-volunteer army grew to include Jim Green, Scott Isler and Sue Weiner.
We didn’t invent anything, but we knew who to emulate. Crawdaddy, Rock Marketplace, Bomp, ZigZag, Crawdaddy, Creem, the NME – that was where words about music changed things for me. Paul Williams, Lenny Kaye, Greg Shaw, Nik Cohn, Nick Kent, Nick Tosches, Alan Betrock, Billy Altman, Ellen Willis, Richard Meltzer, Joe Fleury, Lillian Roxon – they were as much my heroes as the bands they wrote about.
We never had a clear sense of what the magazine meant to anyone. Until we stopped. Since 1984 I have been amazed by how durable a concept, a memory, an ideal Trouser Press turned out to be. Whatever it is, Trouser Press is more of it now than it was 30 years ago, when our obituary ran in Rolling Stone. “Voice of pop-rock underground folds after 10 fan-filled years.”
And fans we were. Musicians told us we knew more about them than they did. We came prepared, and despite our deep-seated snark, we always gave artists a fair shake. If it was Moogy Klingman patiently enduring the questions of three rank amateurs, Steve Harley challenging me over stuff I’d read in the British weeklies, Hugh Cornwell of the Stranglers being a complete prick to staff photographer Linda Danna, Lou Reed playing his asshole character to the hilt with Scott or Jimmy Page giving Dave the most detailed accounting of his career by the pool at the Beverly Hilton, it all became Trouser Press.
None of us set out to be in charge, we just fell into roles, roles for which we were wholly unsuited. I was certainly not cut out to be a businessman, and I take full responsibility for the failure of Trouser Press to become a sprawling media empire, the Pitchfork of its time. But the people involved all had talent, spirit and imagination: Judy Steccone, Kathy Frank, Steve Korte, Ron Gott, Mark Fleischmann, Louise Greif, Wayne King, Kenn Lowy, John Gallagher, Dan Zedek, David Fenichell, Rod Grainger, Craig Campbell.
What ultimately made Trouser Press worth its ink was the incredible world of creative talent we stumbled onto. The list of greats who placed themselves in the pages of Trouser Press still shocks me. David Fricke, Ebet Roberts, Mick Farren, John Leland, Jon Young, Gloria Stavers, Laura Levine, Pete Silverton, Jim Sullivan, Bill Flanagan, Marianne Meyer, Steven Grant, Dave Godlis, Pete Frame, Jim Sullivan, Paul Rambali, Mitch Kearney, Laura Fissinger, Kurt Loder, John Walker, Marilyn Laverty, Cary Baker, Amy Horowitz, Savage Pencil, BC Kagan, Roman Szolkowski....
And they did it for peanuts. I am embarrassed at how little we were able to pay such valuable people. I have no defense for that except that we didn’t have any money. Simple as that. We operated as a collective of sorts, and everyone’s contribution was part of a group effort to accomplish something worthwhile. I am gratified and relieved that many of them went on to far more lucrative success.
We even had world-class interns: Tim Sommer, Fran De Feo, Pearl Lieberman, Linda Walker, Eric Hoffert, Adam Auslander, Jay Paquette, Miriam Kuznets and others, many of whom built distinguished careers in the music world and beyond.
Speaking of beyond: Karen bowed out of an active role in the magazine after a few years and went on to found Rock Read, a company of her own that sold music books by mail order. An Amazon of the ’80s, you might say. Like many of the people who knew and admired her, I was shocked by her death in 1989 from cancer.
Jim Green brought his gangly Berkeley pal Joel Webber into the Sam Goody’s record store where we both worked in early 1976, and I hired him on the spot to be our ad director. With his energy, his bravado and his height, Joel was a boon to our fledgling operation, although we did once end up throwing each other over desks in our tiny Times Square office. I watched in awe as he went on to a career as a director of the New Musical Seminar and an A&R man at Island Records. Joel’s 1988 funeral was a heartbreaker.
Mick Farren, who died last summer, was a true rock legend. I never imagined we deserved to have him write for us, certainly not for what we were able to pay him, but I was proud as hell every month when he came in with his Surface Noise column. Mick was a great writer, but he was much more than that. A crucial ‘60s figure in British politics, bands, culture and publishing.
Back to the living, and then I promise I’ll stop. Dave Schulps and I have stayed friends for 45 years, and I can assure you that I would not be here tonight if not for him. He shaped my musical taste and redirected my life. Without realizing it at the time, we took a leap together that changed us both. We share a lot, we do – just ask us to recite the dialogue from Putney Swope in synch if you want proof – but we’re very different people, and a couple of years spent putting out a magazine made some of those ways abundantly clear. I had the perseverance – or lack of imagination, call it what you will -- to stick it out for 10 years, dealing with the nuts and bolts of running a small business, while Dave went off to manage a band before settling into the career he still excels at: reporter, interviewer and writer.
Since the magazine ended, I’ve gotten a lot more credit for Trouser Press than I deserve. Dave is not the only other person who gave the magazine its truth and soul, but he certainly leads that list. Simply put, Trouser Press would not have existed – or mattered -- if not for him.
Trouser Press lives on at www.TrouserPress.com. The Bell House in Brooklyn is allowing us to co-present two nights of power pop with some of our favorite bands – Shoes, Dwight Twilley, Pezband and Paul Collins’ Beat. That’s May 9th and 10th and I hope many of you can join us.
