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.

TP 31, August 1978

From the editor’s note: “Lest anyone think we’ve gone soft in the editorial head, this will be the last issue featuring an American band on the cover for a while. We certainly haven’t abandoned our identity as America’s Only British Rock Magazine, but we’ve realized that the magazine has to branch out and try new things to keep fresh and in touch. We cover bands we feel merit attention, and can’t see any reason to exclude a good Yankee band when one saunters along.” Photograph of Rick Nielsen at the Bottom Line by Linda Danna Robbins.

TP 32, October 1978

Calling Ray Davies “Ol’ Gap-Tooth” — we sure were irreverent, weren’t we? Cover photo by Richard E. Aaron. Blue background by art director Scott Isler. Inside article on the Troggs by Kurt Loder. Notable aspect of the magazine’s publishing history: after three years we eliminated the eye-straining (and by then money-losing) record collector’s auction ads that had been resident in the back of the magazine. How’d we do it? We launched a separate bi-monthly newspaper, Trouser Press Collectors Magazine, to focus on that end of things. And a whole other TP story began. (Those issues — minus the ads — are being scanned for future posting. Watch this space.)

TP 33, November 1978

This parody of a 16 magazine cover was (we thought) the most brilliant thing we’d ever done. Then we got letters saying, “Yuccchhh! That stupid cover looks like 16 magazine!” People really didn’t get it. For our part, the memorable problem was Lester Bangs’ Ramones article, which ran in the (weekly) New Musical Express before our (monthly) issue hit the streets. Since we’d assigned and arranged the piece, we asked Bangs what the hell he was doing reselling his article out from under us. “I always do this,” he replied innocently. To be fair, what we were able to pay for his work didn’t entitle us to our indignation, but indignant we were.

TP 34, December 1978

Having confused readers with TP 33, we worried that this cover would get us mistaken for a guitar gear magazine. Mitch Kearney took the sleek photo. The story was the first half of an ambitious undertaking: a detailed consideration, in alphabetical order, of the players who had rocked our world. It’s a pretty eclectic and, for the most part, defensible (for the late ’70s) list, not that we didn’t get a shitload of mail complaining about players we’d left out.

For the complete list of guitarists chosen by Trouser Press in 1978, click here.

TP 35, January 1979

Great rhyming headline, hunh? Jerry Casale looks suitably impressed in this Ebet Roberts photo. Inside, we had three separate articles on the spudboys from Akron: YES! by Cole Springer, NO! by Steven Grant and MAYBE! by Ira Robbins. Nobody could accuse us of taking sides on this pressing issue as we neared the dawn of a new decade.

TP 36, February 1979

Our tête-à-tête with Lou Reed (in which the prince of darkness countered Scott Isler’s questions with remarks like “I know your type — a typical downtrodden Jew … a make-believe hippie … This is the worst nightmare. I’ve dreamed of this on the subway …”) acquired an unexpectedly grotesque footnote when Banger, the artist who delivered the accompanying illustration, performed a shocking demonstration of self-mutilation at another publication a few days later. The cover photograph was by our reliable and extremely talented pal Mitch Kearney.

TP 37, April 1979

Our fifth anniversary issue threw the Who on the cover (again) for an interview with Jeff Stein, director of The Kids Are Alright. (About a year and a half earlier, we had run an ad soliciting film clips for the project.) One of the anniversary features was a survey of various persons’ whereabouts in March 1974: among the respondents were Lou Reed, Paul Weller, Tom Petty, Captain Sensible, Meat Loaf (Meat Loaf??) and an unprintable Elvis Costello.

TP 38, May 1979

On the outside, a classic Bob Gruen photo of New York’s very own Winston O’Boogie (minus the Statue of Liberty) over our little Devo-id witticism headline. Inside, the issue was billed as “Home of the Anglophiliac Cabal” in response to a Robert Christgau criticism of our musical narrow-mindedness. By the way, that’s not a new cover price, just the way we looked in Canada, where some weird rule forbade the explicit indication of a price in Canadian dollars different from the price in US dollars, forcing us to print an alternate cover for readers in the Great White North.

TP 39, June 1979

I’m your puppet … How we got that image of Elvis is as much a forgotten mystery as where we found a writer (Lynn Allen) willing to let us publish her Bob Dylan interview. Otherwise, we maintained our bifurcated commitment to beloved oldtimers and raging youth. And, thanks to the wonderful Pete Frame, got the best of both worlds in a pub rock family tree.

TP 40, July 1979

The Keith Richards story came from our Rock & Folk pal Philip Manoeuvre in Paris, the illustration was by Brad Hamann and the name of the band, inadvertently, was the result of our informing Keith (or perhaps it was Ronnie) that the name of their planned side project, the Barbarians — as any Nuggets owner would know — was already taken.