Trouser Press Magazine Archive

Trouser Press magazine published a total of 95 issues between 1974 and 1984. They’ve all been scanned and posted here. The contents are searchable within each issue. Click here for an index of every review, article, column, flexi-disc and news item that ever appeared in the magazine.

TOTP 11, November/December 1975

That’s Scottish rock legend Alex Harvey in a sinister-looking trench coat on the cover. The photo was taken during a stroll out of a midtown Manhattan rehearsal studio where we inadvertently discovered the as-yet-unannounced existence of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Inside the issue, in addition to a letter to the editor from paid subscriber Gene Simmons, there’s a great Ducks Deluxe article, which had arrived, unsolicited, in the mail from England. The gifted young writer whose handwritten byline we couldn’t quite discern (and took it to be Pete Silvester) was in fact future Sounds staffer Pete Silverton.

TOTP 12, February/March 1976

With a cover cobbled together in desperation that we had no single compelling image, we paid tribute as best we could to Roxy Music. The “NY Rock” cover line formalized a new section in the magazine. No doubt mindful of Punk and the New York Rocker, we finally rethought our geophobic editorial outlook (which mandated no special treatment for our hometown) and realized our dereliction of duty in not covering the history being made in New York. In this issue, we covered Television, Milk ‘n’ Cookies and the John Collins Band, proving that we had a unique sense of what was important on the local front.

TOTP 13, April/May 1976

Lucky 13! Not one of our best covers, but we were learning — about flawed photos, lack of design concept, font nightmares and gratuitous digs at the day’s prevalent dance music. Inside, we were still typing all of our text on a rented IBM Selectric and filling the back eight pages with eye-straining auction ads. Also, we got to fulfill an ambition implicit when we began: to interview Rory Gallagher, who could not have been nicer. On the other hand, the Flamin’ Groovies piece brought us a weird phone call from Cyril Jordan, who was steamed about something.

TP 14, June/July 1976

Still black and white, but no longer burdened by a four-word name. We had stripped down to just Trouser Press, cutting out the Trans-Oceanic part. Below that innovation on the cover, Chuck Pulin’s complementary photos of the irrepressible Keith Moon are divided by white drum sticks. Neat, hunh? This issue marked the “semi-retirement” of Karen Rose, Trouser Press‘s co-founder and first publisher, from the magazine to pursue other ventures in the words-and-music industry.

TP 15, August/September 1976

Our second cartoon cover, this one of Dr. Feelgood by Roman Szolkowski, accompanied our first typeset (rather than typed) issue. Although you couldn’t exactly call it a theme here, there’s a lot about bands from what was then the tail end of the pub rock era this month.

TP 16, October/November 1976

Our naïve progress took a great leap forward with the discovery that we could print our covers in an ink color other than black. As you can see, we simply took a black and white Linda Danna (who that month, as noted inside, became Linda Danna Robbins by marrying the magazine’s co-founder) photo of Freddie Mercury and Bryan May, did a horrible silhouette job (which evidently included chopping off their feet!) and put it on a pale green field with some green type. In retrospect, it’s amazing that it took more than two years and 15 issues to reach this point, but it was a revelation to us at the time.

TP 17, December 1976/January 1977

We were so stunned by what we had achieved graphically on the cover of issue 16 that we did the same thing on the next one. The sickly salmon wrapping for the slightly improved silhouette job on Charles Charas’s snap of ELO’s Jeff Lynne and violinist Mik Kaminski showed that we hadn’t mastered the design concept, but (fortunately) we were done with it so it didn’t matter.

TP 18, February/March 1977

Well, this was a more reliable cover design approach: a rectangular black and white photo and a simple, safe color around it. (We liked it so much we did exactly the same thing, in red, for issue 19.) With some poetic justice, we matched the last cries of glam rock and what is now called classic rock with an early article about the new wave scene exploding in England.

TP 19, April/May 1977

Roman Szolkowski drew our mascot, the Bonzo Dog, waving a British flag and wearing a “TP” T-shirt (on sale inside the magazine for $4.50, from a New Jersey shop operated by future Smithereens drummer and rock scholar Dennis Diken). We liked the little guy so much we used him on the cover to balance the Janet Macoska photo of Phil Lynott. (So much for the future-looking of TP 18; this returned to the tried and true.)

TP 20, June/July 1977

A real breakthrough: our first full-color cover on our last bi-monthly issue. (And a revised slogan which we abandoned after two uses.) Unfortunately, you wouldn’t know it from the reproduction of Ron Gott’s photo of Peter Gabriel bathed in red light. We were more thrilled with the back cover, a Dave Edmunds ad with more balanced skin tone. It’s 1977, and the Damned jostling Rick Wakeman for cover credit is a sign of the times. This issue also had an announcement that TP was gearing up for monthly onslaughts. Hello, big-time.