By Steven Ward (July 2001)

Whenever I interview rock writers for this site, I always ask them to name their favorite music critics — writers that make them want to read about pop music. Many of these writers drop the name of Jon Pareles, the pop music critic for the New York Times. Ira Robbins recently called him “by far the finest working critic in America.”

Because of accolades like that, I had to find out for myself what makes this guy so great. I was always a great fan of Pareles’s work at the New York Times. During the following e-mail interview, Pareles talks about his time as a full-time staffer at Crawdaddy!, Rolling Stone, and the Village Voice before taking over for the late and legendary Robert Palmer at the New York Times.

During the course of the interview, I found (as you will) some of what makes Pareles so special. Some lessons fellow critics might learn: never limit yourself to writing about one genre of music; album liner notes contain just as many enlightening ideas as newspapers and magazines; and writing for a newspaper may be more fun than writing for the monthlies.

So sit back and let one of the masters tell you a thing or two about the Peter Pan profession of rock journalism.

Steven:    There was a time when rock criticism was considered a very influential force in popular culture journalism and you happen to be the pop music critic at the nation’s (arguably) most respected daily newspaper. Your music writing obviously reaches many people. Do you think rock criticism is still an influential force today? And what do you see as your mission at the New York Times?

Jon:    Was rock criticism ever influential? I have my doubts. I know it reaches people who care about music and who want more variety, depth, honesty, independence or crankiness than they get from other sources of information about music. (It also reaches some very touchy musicians.) But popular music too rarely informs broader culture journalism. Most of my fellow newspaper writers would probably agree that in newsrooms, rock critics are seen as dealing with mere “entertainment” and “kid stuff”–even when an Eminem album is a more complex cultural artifact than most movies, TV or fiction. And pundits who wouldn’t dream of not knowing about The Sopranos cheerfully flaunt their ignorance of gangsta rap, which has far greater cultural repercussions.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Popular music, sometimes even music that sells millions of albums, can still move under the radar, which makes it so ceaselessly fascinating. If pop culture is society’s id, music is the fastest, most polymorphous, least compromised vision of that id, so it’s strange that more people don’t pay more attention. But hey, it’s not my problem.

Back to your question: I would never call what I do a “mission.” (If there’s anything a fan should learn from rock, it’s not to take yourself too seriously.) My job is the same as any other journalist and critic with specialized knowledge: to see what’s going on, tell the truth about it, offer a judgment and give some sense of what’s behind that judgment. And privately, it’s about figuring the music out for myself. I’m not trying to impose my taste on the universe, since that would eliminate surprises; as Mao Zedong said (though he didn’t mean it), “Let a hundred schools of thought contend.” I just want to provide a vivid account of what I hear and one informed perspective.

At the New Music Seminar one year, when I was wearing a name tag, someone came up to me and said, “So you’re Jon Pareles. I never agree with anything you write.” I shook his hand and was happy to meet him. For that guy, I’m a completely reliable critic; all he had to do was take the opposite of my advice. That’s fine with me. But I’d rather have my record collection than his.

Steven:    Tell me about how you first got involved in the rock criticism business? Where were you first published and how did you wind up at Crawdaddy! in the ’70s?

Jon:    Except for my high school and college newspapers, Crawdaddy! was the first place I was published.

I had always been attracted to music–I have perfect pitch–and started playing the piano when I was 6. I played keyboard and flute in rock bands during high school, and majored in (classical) music for my B.A. at Yale. But I spent just as much time at the radio station, where I became music director, listening to all the new albums and suggesting what songs to play. I also played in a rock band, sat in on flute with some jazz musicians and pealed out music on the carillon, a belltower full of heavy metal (54 bronze bells): acoustic broadcasting. And back in the early 1970s, I got to use the music school’s very early electronic music studio, including an Arp 2600 synthesizer that took up most of the room and was hooked together with patch cords. Getting sounds from it helped me understand a lot of the electronic music to come.

A friend who was also at the radio station, Gary Lucas–a virtuoso guitarist who went on to play with Captain Beefheart and Jeff Buckley–had written some rock reviews for various magazines, and told me he got free albums. After I graduated, I had a dim idea of becoming a disc jockey, but luckily–I’m so glad I didn’t become a radio disc jockey–no commercial station was interested in my tapes.

I had acquired a serious new-album habit, though, and I had written a few reviews for the college paper. So I thought I’d try to become a writer. In late 1974 or early 1975 I sent out a packet of three reviews to Crawdaddy!, Fusion and Rolling Stone magazines. (I don’t remember if I got names off mastheads or just sent them to Reviews Editor.) I never heard from Rolling Stone, but John Swenson at Crawdaddy! accepted one (of a Lambert, Hendricks and Ross reissue, which came out soon after Joni Mitchell recorded Annie Ross’s “Twisted”) and encouraged me to do more. Fusion was about to fold, but its editor/publisher was starting a giveaway paper for the Boston area (where I was living) with the unfortunate name of PopTop, and he wanted me to write for it. The pay per article was approximately zero, but I did a lot of writing and saw a lot of shows. I later wrote a few columns for the Real Paper, an alternative weekly.

Eventually, Crawdaddy! realized that I was a careful self-editor as well as a writer they wanted to use regularly, and in 1977 they offered me a job as copy editor. This was no longer the beloved magazine founded by Paul Williams but its later incarnation, bankrolled by the editor’s father. Still, there were so few nationally distributed non-teen rock magazines that Crawdaddy! published some fine writers, including Timothy White (now editing Billboard), Mitch Glazer and Charles M. Young, as well as most of the Trouser Press crew. I came to New York for that job and I’ve been here ever since.

It was a lucky time to come to New York: the moment when the city was germinating the ideas that would dominate the next generation. Punk, hip-hop, dance music and art-rock were all new and all mixed up with each other; Philip Glass was playing at the Peppermint Lounge, Fab Five Freddy was rapping with Max Roach at the Kitchen in SoHo. There was always something new to discover.

Steven:    You went from Crawdaddy! to Rolling Stone. Was that exciting and how did you make that jump?

Steven:    I deserted a sunken ship. Crawdaddy! had folded, possibly because its status as a tax write-off had run out. By then, I was the music editor, assigning/editing/proofreading record reviews and front-of-the-book short features. Tim White had already moved on to Rolling Stone, where he had assigned me some stories (including a cover on the Cars) and clearly was praising me to the right people. They needed an assistant music editor, a deputy to Peter Herbst who was running the front-of-the-book music department, and that was my job. Rolling Stone had much snazzier offices and a bigger staff, and felt like a real business. It also felt like an institution, with a lot of people who had longstanding relationships that didn’t particularly welcome newcomers. I learned a lot–watching Jann Wenner take up a cover story, devour it, point out precisely what its unanswered questions were and then jet off to other business–but I didn’t have a lot of say. Or perhaps I wasn’t pushy enough.

Steven:    I understand that you were at Rolling Stone for a very short time. (Maybe a year.) Why did you leave and did you feel like the magazine or its editors at the time did not allow you the space or assignments to strut your stuff, so to speak?

Jon:    Mostly I left for a better job. (Jim Henke, now running the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, took the one at Rolling Stone.) I had been freelancing around New York, including writing for the Village Voice, and when Robert Christgau took a leave of absence for a year to write his Consumer Guide in 1980, I was offered his job temporarily. The Voice had a tradition of treating writers respectfully, and it was a much better written paper then than it is now. Staff writers and regular contributors included hotshots like Tom Carson, James Wolcott, Peter Schjeldahl, Alexander Cockburn (before he got lazy), Geoffrey Stokes and many others, along with smart writers like J. Hoberman and Michael Feingold who are still there. Christgau pushed the music writers to make each review speak to something beyond simply rating an album. The job offered a chance to work with a great stable of writers (Gary Giddins, Tom Johnson, Greg Sandow and freelancers like RJ Smith, Lester Bangs, Nelson George, Vince Aletti and Tom Smucker), to write as much or as little as I wanted and, most of all, to have autonomy. It was supposed to last six months; I think it lasted a year and a half, and it was a wonderful gig.

Steven:    I know you played keyboards for the Rolling Stone ”in-house” band, The Dry Heaves, along with Jann Wenner, Kurt Loder, Timothy White and others. Do you think rock critics should stay away from musical instruments or do you still play today?

Jon:    I don’t think critics should stay away from anything. A critic should learn as much about music as possible, from any angle that seems interesting: music theory, history, psychology, literature, theater, acoustics, religion, dance, anthropology, film theory, pharmacology, economics, fashion, linguistics, electronics, sports, and all the other things that touch on music. Playing an instrument and being in a band help you appreciate what musicians have to learn, how groups make decisions and how songs feel from the inside. It’s one way, though not the only way, to understand how music works.

If critics were forbidden to play, you’d lose some fine music by ex-critics and current critics like Chrissie Hynde, Patti Smith, Ira Kaplan, Stephin Merritt and Sasha Frere-Jones. But obviously you don’t have to be a good musician to be a good critic; there are many other perspectives.

As for me, I spent so much time listening to music and writing that I rarely had the opportunity to play, until I fell so much out of practice that it was hard to listen to myself. I guarantee the world did not lose much of a keyboard player when I became a writer. I still keep threatening to start again, though.

Steven:    I know Robert Christgau’s writing and the man himself had a huge impact on you. Tell me about that impact and the relationship between the two of you.

Jon:    I greatly respect Christgau. He can pack megatons of erudition and perception into one of his famously dense clauses. As anyone who wrote for him can tell you, he’s the kind of editor who always improves his writers: not making them sound like him, but bringing out more clearly what they were trying to say in the first place. Before I was even thinking about writing about music, Christgau was one of the people who were fighting, and winning, the battle to have rock criticism addressed intelligently by writers, and to be read seriously by the kind of people who have discovered this web site.

Sometimes our tastes agree, sometimes they don’t, though his are always backed by a good argument. I share his affection for African music; I’m baffled by his blind spot with heavy metal. And I was thrilled when he lent me his job.

But when I was at the Voice on a daily basis, Bob obviously wasn’t, and I wouldn’t say we have a relationship other than friendly mutual respect. I’m not part of his circle of close friends, or of some imaginary rock-critic in-group. And while I may not be a reliable analyst of my own approach, I’d say a greater influence was the other Robert: Robert Palmer, who brought me to the Times and passed his job on to me.

Palmer was a seemingly effortless, straightforward writer who was always listening to everything: Ornette Coleman, ethnomusicology from Chad, Megadeth, the Five Du-Tones, Pandit Pran Nath, Live Skull and of course the blues. He had an ear for connections; at times, I thought he had what I’d call a phonographic memory, allowing him to cross-check anything he’d ever heard. His way of explaining his musicology sounded natural rather than pedantic, and he got astonishing stories out of the musicians he talked to. Palmer had a taste for the noisy and un-tempered–from the blues to raga, he loved music that couldn’t be reduced to Western notation–that has proved to be extremely durable. And when he brought me to the Times, he was a good example to follow because he was one of the few bylines there (along with Vincent Canby and the sportswriters) who wrote conversationally, not sounding stuffy or taking on an English accent.

Steven:    Sort of in-line with the above question, tell me about your rock critic/music writer influences and your favorite rock magazines that you read in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

Jon:    It was never just rock criticism. I’d say the reading that arrived at the most crucial moment was Ishamel Reed’s novel Mumbo Jumbo, a wild-eyed, hilarious romp through history, myth, race, sex and other things with a direct bearing on music. Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, the great American rock novel, also had a decisive early effect. And all the Dr. Seuss books in my childhood showed me that words were for sound as well as meaning.

I didn’t read a lot of rock criticism growing up. I was too busy with music itself (and other things). Of course Rolling Stone was around, and though I didn’t pay much attention to particular writers, Paul Nelson, Ed Ward, Chet Flippo, Stephen Holden and Dave Marsh certainly sank in. R. Meltzer’s ideas about rock’s irrational genius shaped the way I listen, and I also read Ellen Willis in the New Yorker, though I don’t think I realized just how astute she was until I read the pieces later in her anthology Beginning to See the Light. My main exposure to music criticism was probably through liner notes: Palmer on a lot of jazz albums, Lenny Kaye on Nuggets and John Mendelssohn on The Kinks Kronikles, for instance.

Living in Boston, I read good critics like Michael Bloom and Bob Blumenthal in the Phoenix and James Isaacs in the Real Paper and my fellow fledglings atPopTop, including Steve Morse (now at the Boston Globe), Don Shewey, and Michael Freedberg. But only when I started writing did I start reading rock criticism in any organized way: Rolling Stone, the Voice and good old Creem, then at its comic peak with writers like Lester Bangs and Rick Johnson. That was also when I read Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train, and was impressed by the way he found metaphysical significance in every microscopic musical nuance. As an editor at Crawdaddy!, Rolling Stone and the Voice, I read just about everybody who was or wanted to be a critic at the time, and I probably learned something from all of them.

Steven:    How and when did you end up writing about pop music at the New York Times and was that a bigger experience for you than landing a gig atRolling Stone?

Jon:    The New York Times was supposed to be a summer job. I was freelancing after Christgau came back to the Voice, and also working on the first edition of the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll. In the summer of 1982, two of the Times‘s critics, Stephen Holden (who was writing about rock) and John S. Wilson (who was writing about jazz and cabaret) both went on vacation. Because I was writing about a broad range of music and could cover both Holden’s and Wilson’s areas, Palmer brought me in to fill the gap.

I was a stringer–a freelancer–and the gig was supposed to end when Wilson and Holden got back. But the “Culture” section of the Times had just changed editors, and every editor likes to have more troops, so they kept me on. In 1985, the Voice offered me the music editorship since Christgau was giving it up, and after agonizing over the choice, I decided I preferred writing to editing, and ended up using the offer to persuade the Times to put me on staff.

Soon afterwards, in the late 1980s, Palmer decided he was tired of the grind, and he went back to his old stomping grounds, Oxford, Miss. (near Memphis) to teach and write a book. That’s when I became the chief pop critic at the Times.

And yes, it was a very big deal. My mother started to tell people what I did for a living, and people I hadn’t heard from in years, who weren’t reading music magazines, saw my name in the Times.

The Times was, and is, a giant institution, and especially back then, it still had the grimy romance of newspapering. Although the linotype era was over–typesetting was done by computer, and only a few people still wore eye shades–it was still a throng of people working above a big printing press. The typeset stories would be pasted down by hand, and if they didn’t fit at the last minute, they’d slice off the closing paragraph: “cut on the slab,” punchline or no punchline. Trucks pulled in from 43d Street with giant rolls of blank newsprint and drove out with damp newspapers. The first time you got a story on the front page, they’d give you the etched metal plate it was printed with. Since then, the press has been moved out of town, and in a few years, the Times will move to a gleaming new corporate headquarters; it’s in the information business now.

Despite the Times‘s stodgy image, Robert Palmer had been quick on the uptake for punk, hip-hop, no wave and all kinds of other avant-gardes. (So was John Rockwell before him; Rockwell, after detours through classical music and running the Lincoln Center Summer Festival, is now the editor of the Arts and Leisure section.)

At the Times, the editors don’t second-guess the pop critics. When I got there they were all from an older generation that cared more about classical music, and even now, with an early baby-boomer hierarchy, they assume we know more about the subject than they do. We get treated something like being a science correspondent or the head of the New Delhi bureau; we’re sending back dispatches from the distant reaches of Musicville. As a result–and unlike writing for a music magazine–no one was particularly worried about what was in the pop charts. We could, and still do, cover what we think is worthwhile. Palmer could write all he wanted about Sonic Youth–which was quite a bit–and I can follow my own inclinations, though obviously I’m not going to skip Madonna at Madison Square Garden.

Back in 1982, not many people had PCs, and I used to go to the office to write, wearing the jacket and tie I had bought for the new job. Everyone there seemed considerably older than I was, and they thought I was covering barbarians, but once it was clear that I was a “clean” writer (not a lot of editing work), that my facts were straight and my opinions were intelligible, and that I was dependable, I was treated as a colleague. The tie soon disappeared, as did the jacket, and once I got my first PC I mostly worked at home, where the albums and stereo are.

Incidentally, this might be the spot to clarify what I do at the Times. A lot of people seem to assume that I’m some sort of music czar there, overseeing every word written about popular music, and I’m not. What I do is write; I also assign the weekly review schedule. Otherwise, I don’t assign or edit, much less oversee all the various music coverage in the paper. If “Arts & Leisure,” “Metro,” “Business,” “Style” or the New York Times Magazine run a music story, they do so on their own. It’s a big organization.

Steven:    As a Times writer, you write record and concert reviews and you report music feature and news stories. Which of those do you prefer and why?

Jon:    I’m a critic by temperament, not a reporter. I can do reporting, and I generally have a good time with interviews. But I’d rather analyze and interpret than track down the he-said, she-said nuggets that make good reporting, and I’d rather do musical studies than character studies, which is what features are. Every critic should get facts right–that means reporting–and character is part of music. But reporters have to strive to be objective, while critics are subjective, which is more fun. I have boundless respect for the good, careful, revelatory reporting I see all around me at the Times, and a snappy feature is a pleasure to read. But what I like to do best is a combination of close-ups–concert reviews, album reviews–and long shots, where looking at an entire musical landscape yields some insight.

Steven:    You would think that the Times would keep you extremely busy. But you find time to freelance. What keeps you writing for other publications?

Jon:    I try to limit repetition at the Times. If I’ve written about somebody’s previous album, then I prefer to have Ann Powers or Neil Strauss or Ben Ratliff or a freelancer write about the next one: readers get a fresh perspective. Similarly, if I’ve reviewed an album, I like to send someone else out to review the concert. So if I know I’m not writing about something for the Times, and if someone asks me, and if I’m interested, I freelance.

Steven:    Tell me about which rock mags you read today and who are your favorite current rock/pop writers out there now?

Jon:    I read a lot of magazines occasionally, among them Rolling Stone, Spin, Billboard, the Village Voice, the Source, Entertainment Weekly, CMJ(weekly and monthly), Alternative Press, Vibe, Rhythm, No Depression, Reggae and African Beat, Wire, NME, Tower’s Pulse, DJ Times and on and on.

As for writers, I got the Times to hire the best ones I could find: Neil Strauss, an extremely rare combination of amazing reporter, knowing critic and hilarious writer; brainy, heartfelt, far-seeing Ann Powers and eclectic, penetrating, imagistic Ben Ratliff. Stephen Holden was at the Times before me, and he’s primarily a film critic now, but he still writes about cabaret and singer-songwriters, and he conveys like nobody else the way words, music and voices fit together. All together, it’s the best popular-music staff the Times has ever had.

Other music writers I recruited, who were in and out of the Times while I’ve been there, are Karen Schoemer, Danyel Smith, and Peter Watrous. Incidentally, there are other things to read besides rock criticism. I’m also a fan of two of the Times‘s classical critics, Bernard Holland and Paul Griffiths; the architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, and the art critic Holland Cotter.

Among other music writers I enjoy, let’s start with daily-newspaper writers like Tom Moon, Greg Kot, Geoffrey Himes, Steve Morse, J.D. Considine, Jim Farber, Edna Gundersen, Richard Harrington, and David Hinckley, who manage to be graceful and intelligent under daily constraints and deadlines. In magazines, one writer no one should overlook is David Fricke, who’s equally brilliant in reviews, features and historical liner notes; he does serious research, pays attention to both music and people and writes with real spark.

I also like, along with writers I’ve already mentioned and in no particular order, Rob Sheffield, Joshua Clover/Jane Dark, and Mike Rubin for irreverence and big ideas; Charles Aaron, who slips deep thoughts into little spaces; Eric Weisbard, who chews on complex questions; Anthony DeCurtis, who knows how to assess icons, and a bunch of others, alphabetically: Lorraine Ali, Michael Azerrad, Jon Caramanica, Sue Cummings, Francis Davis, Celeste Fraser Delgado, Banning Eyre, Will Hermes, James Hunter, Enrique Lavin, Alan Light, Amy Linden, Michaelangelo Matos, Mike McGonigal, Peter Margasak, Rob Marriott, Sia Michel, Ed Morales, Simon Reynolds, Scott Schindler, Ethan Smith, Toure, and more that I’ll probably think of later.

Steven:    Reaching a lot of readers is an obvious advantage to writing about music for a publication like the New York Times, but what else do you think is important about your position and what are your personal goals in music writing for the Times?

Jon:    Don’t tell anybody, but the job is really an excuse for my continuing education. New York in all its variety–social, artistic, ethnic, attitudinal, sonic–is a cornucopia of musical phenomena and a constant spur to learn more.

I don’t forget that I’m writing for the New York Times, and the paper is supposed to be comprehensive. To me, covering popular music in New York City means paying attention to the full spectrum of music here: rock, hip-hop, pop, jazz, Latin, dance, world, avant-garde, commercial, non-commercial. That’s what the job should be, and that’s what I try to do. Obviously I can’t get to even a fraction of what can be heard–I’d have to go to ten shows a night–but I hope that over the course of a year I can give readers a glimpse of the music that’s out there.

I love the nightly variety: N’Sync, Cheikka Rimitti, Dismemberment Plan, the Dirty Dozen Bass Band, Squarepusher. But I also have another goal, which is to fight provincialism. No one has to like everything–there are huge amounts of mediocrity out there–but no one should be afraid of certain music or deliberately ignorant of it. Cliquey types who listen to just one kind of music, whether it’s classic rock or hip-hop, are only depriving themselves.

People still sometimes act as if the Times should define the taste of the elite, or if whatever is covered in the Times is therefore within the elite. I’m happy if something I write about in the Times is then picked up by other media, though it would be better if they made their own decisions. But “Hound Dog” was right–if they say it’s high class, that’s just a lie. Rock, and popular music in general, proves again and again that the elite is the last to get the good stuff; it almost invariably comes up from the lowest classes and, sometimes, from the underworld. Trying to cover popular music from the top down, whether that’s the Top 10 or what the yuppies are listening to, would be ridiculous.

The center–arena concerts, hit albums–is important, but so are the margins. This is where popular music differs from the other arts beats, like books or film (despite a smattering of independent films), and from sports, which basically covers the pros. Music is far more decentralized, and it can thrill you in a stadium, in a basement or between headphones.

Steven:    What is your take on the state of rock criticism today? Many, comparing it to the adventurous writing in the ’70s, dismiss what’s published today as PR hype. What do you think?

Jon:    Everything looks better through nostalgia, and I don’t believe we’re necessarily worse off now. It’s true that in the 1970s, feature writers could get a lot closer to bands, a la Almost Famous, and that the publicity machines weren’t quite so slick. Magazines also gave writers more space per article, which could be room for crazed inspiration (Lester Bangs) or bloat (no comment); now, there’s more of an emphasis on consumer advice–thumbs up or thumbs down–than extended thought. It’s hard to say much in a 150-word capsule review, or to project much personality.

But the real difficulty–for criticism, not for music–is the sheer avalanche of releases, 25,000 to 30,000 a year. If a publication wants to cover as many worthwhile ones as you can, then each gets fewer words. One response to that overwhelming number of albums is for writers to turn into specialists: only hip-hop/R&B, only dance music, only punk and metal. It’s part of the whole divisive niche-marketing mentality of the 1980s and 1990s, and for a critic it’s a mistake. Musicians keep their ears wide open; they’ll steal from anywhere, and they should. And listeners don’t go to stores thinking, “I want a two-step garage song”–they just want good music.

The narrowness of too many music critics is at odds with what happens in the real world. I’ve found that musical events are what you might call culturally demilitarized zones, where people and ideas can interact freely. Music always invites people in, even if they’re outsiders with notebooks.

The flipside to the glut of releases is that there are also more outlets for information about music than ever before. Music magazines are proliferating, competing for every micro-niche and sometimes aiming for a general audience, and of course there’s the Internet, where everybody’s a reviewer. The writing’s not usually stylish, and rumors masquerade as facts, but, again, schools of thought are out there contending. Among the pros, meanwhile, look at that long list above: There are as many smart writers now as there ever were.

Steven:    Newspaper writing or magazine writing? Which do you prefer and why?

Jon:    Newspaper writing, no contest. Newspaper writing is almost instant gratification. Soon after it’s written, it’s in print, if not the next day then by the end of the week. With magazines, I’ve just about forgotten what I’ve written by the time it comes out.

Yes, there are serious constraints in newspaper writing; no obscenities, the need to paraphrase what’s going on even in some non-obscene lyrics because they get too raunchy for “a family newspaper,” and the occasional copy-editor demand to explain something I don’t think needs explaining (just the other day I had to insert that the Go-Gos were an all-female band). I also don’t like calling everybody Mr. or Ms., though it does have some enjoyably absurd moments: Mr. Sixx? But the inconveniences are worth it because writing improves when you’re constantly seeking clarity and economy. Magazines have their own editorial tics anyway.

Beyond that, writing for a newspaper means you might reach someone who wasn’t already interested in music. A newspaper is a miscellany: Kosovo, New Jersey, the stock market, recipes, real estate, the crossword puzzle. That’s a good thing; something is lost with those online news services that only tell you about what you already know you’re interested in. With a newspaper, readers might be finishing a feature on Lincoln Center or looking for a book review and suddenly find themselves reading about hip-hop or Brazilian music just because it’s on the page, and maybe it will give them a new bit of information or make them curious. You get more serendipity in newspapers.

Steven:   The dreaded Greil Marcus Stranded question. What CD would you bring to a desert island and why?

Jon:   I hope it’s in tomorrow’s mail.

“If Goldstein represented the quandary of what critical practise should be in an age when mediation risked killing the very culture he loved, [early Voice music critic, Annie] Fisher provided an answer: return to pleasure and give up analysis (a stance that would be taken up, in a different way, by the journalists who helped to build Creem)

Both of these quotes are taken from Devon Powers’s Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism (pages 6 and 95, respectively). Of the many specious claims I’ve come across in the book (I like some parts of it, too, though on balance I don’t think the author really achieves the enormity of the task at hand), this is the one that most rubbed me the wrong way — i.e., the idea that Creem was this bastion of anti-intellectualism. Also, the idea that the “journalists” at Creem gave up analysis for pleasure (when really, the point, I think, was to not separate pleasure from analysis, to not even recognize a distinction). Labelling what Tosches, Marsh, and Bangs did as “smart but anti-intellectual” in a book entirely devoted to an important strand of the history of rock intellectualism… I just don’t get that at all. Not to say that there probably weren’t some writers in Creem who might have played that as a certain stance, or a certain move. There was always a “this-isn’t-art” argument lurking below the surface of Creem‘s trash aesthetic, not to mention a lot of fucking around, mocking the musicians, etc. I guess I just don’t read that as anti-thought; it was more about expanding how one could think about this stuff, how something could be analyzed in a way that didn’t necessarily scream “analysis” in bold letters. Lester Bangs typing on stage while the J. Geils Band played their set; this was just a different way to do it.

1. The idea, espoused for years (at least as early back as Dave Marsh saying as much in a Rolling Stone Record Guide), that the group is “overrated” is of course a complete fallacy — the opposite of reality, really — unless the people who call them “overrated” mean that their fans like them too much, in which case every group with any kind of following is “overrated.” Because they’re sure not “overrated” by rock critics, the genre of species we normally rely on to “rate” things — under, over, whatever. Of the many critics whose work I’ve followed over the years, I can count on one hand those who have liked the music of the Doors, by which I don’t include critics who, in that polite, critical way, “admit” that the band “were not devoid of talent” (wow, careful that limb doesn’t break while you say as much). It’s possible that there was more love towards the band in the early days of rock criticism, but I don’t think so; they were pretty much mocked from the get-go, were they not? (Or maybe the disconnect here is that the band was written about much differently in the daily press accounts than in the stuff I have access to, the Creems and Rolling Stones of the world?)

2) On the subject of mockery, sometimes you have to remind people that a critic can mock something, deride it even, and still love it, or at least love parts of it. This is always how I read Meltzer and Bangs on the Doors. In one of his early reviews of them (I forget of which album), Meltzer calls the band (not even Morrison, but the band) “ridiculous” but means it, I’m pretty sure, in a way that is entirely complimentary. Bangs referred to Morrison as a bozo, but also was intensely moved by some of their music; in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, he suggests that “Light My Fire” paved the way for “Gimme Shelter” (an argument I think Greil Marcus picked up in his recent book on the band). One of the trends I find disconcerting in so much music criticism today is that writers seem unwilling to acknowledge the idea that ridiculousness and pretensiousness and buffoonery sometimes don’t prevent great music, and in fact, sometimes lead directly to great music. Pretensiousness can be aesthetically/philosophically worthy in and of itself. This point in some ways is not just related to the Doors — I know people who simply can’t stomach their pretensions enough to hear whatever might be good in it, and that’s fine. No one is required to hear the band the way I do. All I’m saying is…? Pretentiousness CAN be a virtue?

This funny Kids in the Hall clip re: Doors fandom is also notable for its ultra-snide reference to “America’s Only…”

By Scott Woods (July 2001)

‘Metal Mike’ Saunders belongs to that unusual breed of species known as rock-critics-turned-musicians, an esteemed list that also includes (most notably) Lenny Kaye, Andy Shernoff, John Mendelssohn, Neil Tennant, Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Chrissie Hynde, Greg Tate, Ira Kaplan, and Shaggy. After dashing off a record review in 1968 forRolling Stone — at the tender age of 15, no less (stay tuned for the upcoming bio-pic) — he continued to write for a host of music publications until the summer of 1973, at which point he waved bye bye bye to Jann Wenner and co. because “rock music was over.” (Until the Swedes got a hold of it, that is.)

After a stint in the punk band Vom (with fellow scribes Richard Meltzer and Gregg Turner), Saunders co-founded the Angry Samoans, penning such ageless chart toppers as “Right Side of My Mind,” “They Saved Hitler’s Cock,” and “My Old Man’s a Fatso.” In 1999, he was drawn back into the fold of music writing, and he’s been filing massive critical tomes for the Village Voice — America’s foremost teen-pop journal — ever since.

I didn’t think to ask Saunders my burning heavy metal question, but he answered it for me anyway, and I am eternally grateful.

Scott:   What do you make of the fact that at least three young female performers in the last year have appeared in public wearing New York Dolls t-shirts? (I’m talking about members of Dream, Destiny’s Child, and the Corrs.)

Mike:   That’s a darned good question. It must be because it’s a fairly catchy logo, from the ’70s, and everyone knows the word “New York.” I’m sure the music has nothing to do with it. I’ve seen other acts (in magazine photos) besides just the ones you mention.

Scott:   Have you ever appeared in public wearing a New York Dolls t-shirt?

Mike:   At the start of the ’80s, the basic “New York Dolls” logo (red on yellow, or red on blue) was one of the common 2/$7 record store T-shirts around here (up at the stores in Berkeley) back then, so I had a couple. They got sufficient use to eventually wind up stuffed in a “retired” box somewhere.

Scott:   Are you a band t-shirt sort of guy? Why or why not?

Mike:   I am when they come from the $1 Goodwill store racks. Here’s a quick survey of my closet’s ’90s thrift store acquisitions of that $1 type: four Green Day Kerplunk, four ’80s Bon Jovi (two diff designs), Def Leppard Hysteria tour, two Hanson, an ’80s Belinda Carlisle, a Hammer “U Can’t Touch This,” four or five total of my favorite two NKOTB designs (I must’ve seen several dozen over the years, these were the winners), three of the same Debbie Gibson Electric Youth tour, of course a flock of Poison and Warrant shirts (I’m seeing about eight different plus some dupes), two diff Nelson that are very scary (one of ‘em with the whole “band”), and two Pat Benatar Seven The Hard Way tour. And from the last 12 months: six Spice Girls shirts (of five diff designs), two diff B*Witched, and one Britney. I wish to stress these are only the $1 thrift-store shirts, and of acts whose music I’ve enjoyed at one time or another. I’ve passed on reams of thrift store shirts to friends (by acts I don’t like, or just of shirts I didn’t like the design of).

Chuck Eddy probably has several Def Lepperd in his closet to attest to this fact. Being the one-man-corporation “merchandise” mogul (at my band’s gigs), I’ve dropped a screen of the red “Angry Samoans” logo onto my personal wardrobe’s favorite Spice Girls design (twice), a B*Witched, and a Britney, not to mention an early shirt of a hideously grinning ‘N Sync.

Scott:   In your Radio Disney piece you wrote: “Beatles–better songs; [Backstreet Boys]–better beats.” That’s not very fair to Ringo, now, is it…(please expound).

Mike:   Wow, you are of course right since most Beatles recordings 1963-65 have great beats. I hereby extend my sincere apologies to Ringo in hopes that I can be excused from Traveling Wilburys road crew duty for yet another decade.

Scott:   In “Lester Recollected in Tranquility,” Richard Meltzer wrote that Bangs “even begat a not-half-bad (early-‘70s) clone in ‘Metal Mike’ Saunders.” In lieu of me just asking Richard Meltzer to explain, how do you think he meant? And how would you respond to that?

Mike:   Meltzer’s a lot older than me, or I should specifically say WAS. He was like 26 when I was a 19 year old headbanger in 1971 (saying and writing good things about Grand Funk and Black Sabbath, who at that time weren’t touched with a 20 foot stick by anyone else in the rock prozines except Lester Bangs). So I would interpret this as a piece of older brother – younger brother criticism. Who knows what he meant, since explanation is not found in any of the VOM lyrics (recorded or unrecorded…our set had about 14 originals w/Meltzer lyrics, plus “My Eyes Have Seen You” and “Louie Louie”).

Scott:   Did you ever go through a period where (like Meltzer, and maybe Bangs too) you felt that writing about rock was a dead-end, a waste of time?

Mike:   Actually I had a double whammy moment, and a formal “drop out” point in time that was 12/31/73. My favorite rock bands had all tanked in America (commercially)–Stooges, Slade, New York Dolls, Raspberries. Plus by that late moment in time all the rock prozines sucked–Creem and PRM were both pretty lame by this point (PRM changed format around the end of 1973). Like a lot of other fans, I kinda thought rock music was over, kaput. (Let it be noted that the following year 1974 was the end of the UK “glitter rock” chart scene, with every manny, moe & jack scraping the charts, usually pretty dire musically…not to decry Mud’s eternal genius on “Tiger Feet” and “Rocket.”) So I wrote a half-page short on (Ohio hardpop-rock act, ok album on Mercury) Blue Ash in PRM‘s “year end roundup,” with the distinct notion that this was the last thing I was ever gonna say re: “rock music” in the prozine press, not that anyone was counting or keeping track anyway, and my comments were real negative (re: the state of “rock music”). Sure enough, 1974 was by far the worst year for rock music of the entire ’60s or ’70s. I became an ABBA fan and didn’t write a word in a national prozine for 25 years.

Scott:   Is teen-pop your way out of this (supposed) dead-end?

Mike:   Actually, Chuck Eddy contacted me a good 25 years later (very early 1999) and asked, “hey, are you interested in writing something on B*Witched?” Since I already had both the non-LP CD-single track and the 12″ with both dance remixes and the mega-mix medley, as a plain old consumer/music fan, I apparently fit his qualifications to become one of his pop-music hitmen. The fact that I euro-dance “pretty ok for a white boy” is just a bonus.

Scott:   Do you think rock critics are more–or less–attuned to what’s happening in bubblegum and teen pop now than they were 30 years ago?

Mike:   Boy, when I see the lists of what “rock critics” listen to, I have no idea what planet they’re on. Over the last 60 days in April-May 2001 I identified (and acquired the CD-singles of) songs I really liked by Sarina Paris (dance hit “Look At Us”) and Finnish act Tik N Tak (singles “Upside Down,” “Don’t Turn Back”) by trolling the contents of a teenmag named BOP! that recently shifted to all-music coverage. I gather the “rock critics” were busy listenin’ to Radiohead or Lucinda Williams…

Scott:   Would you agree that punk rock made it even more difficult for critics to pursue writing about radio pop and bubblegum? Did punk kill this stuff off in the rock crit voice?

Mike:   Actually I found it even dumbfounding at the time how lame both the mags and writing were in the “overground” music press during the 1977-82 era…i.e., New York Rocker, Trouser Press, ZigZag, etc. The last time I ever felt there was some kind of “rock crit voice” was during the NME era of Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray…During that 1973-1977 stretch I read NME avidly (subscribed) and really thought it a well-edited rock mag, no small note considering that I am about the ultimate anti-Anglophile. (Me like Grand Funk, James Gang etc., don’t own a single tune by can’t-rock weenies the Clash and Elvis Costello.)

Scott:   Who are the best editors you’ve worked for–and what is/was so good about them?

Mike:   Greg Shaw and Marty Cerf at Phonograph Record Magazine were very good, enthusiastic and didn’t mess much with your basic copy or content. Jon Landau as “review editor” at Rolling Stone had to continuously apologize for what their “copy editor” back in San Francisco did to his record review sections he submitted bi-weekly…writers’ copy was hacked and mutilated to the point where it was often unrecognizable. I never wrote much forCreem ’cause it was disorganized and unprofessional beyond description during Lester (Bangs)’s time there as “review editor”…he chronically assigned things that didn’t run/never saw print, i.e., solicited far more reviews each month than saw print, it was a big mess. I kinda had the minority opinion thatCreem was great for about a year, mid-1970 to mid-1971, then had to “sell out” to commercial considerations when they went to a slick cover in Fall 1971…for me as a reader the magazine pretty much sucked after that point in time. For instance, they never ran an article on the Dictators in ’75 (i.e., Girl Crazy), I mean how retarded was that? It was pretty much unanimous in rock fandom at the time that that was one of the best and most important rock albums ever made. 35 years later we’re still listening to babble bout how Bob Dylan revolutionized rock lyrics (in 1965) (always sounded like a folkie on speed with dubious taste in backing musicians to me, but I like the songs anyway); well, the Dictators did that in an entirely different 360o (degrees). For us musical boneheads that don’t understand “poetry,” “Master Race Rock” and “Two Tub Man” were inspiration to write dumbass lyrics and be proud.

Back to “music editors,” Chuck Eddy in modern times is a near genius. What Chuck does with the stuff I’ve written for him, is take the “formal copy” plus all related (informal) e-mails, then cut and paste the two animals together, and then reshuffle some more while adding some catchy phrases or adverb clauses I didn’t think of. Since the funniest stuff is always in long forgotten e-mails, I never know what I’m going to see when something appears in published form.

Scott:   Can you relate any hellish experiences in your dealing with editors over the years?

Mike:   Actually don’t have any. Except for the gruesome things Rolling Stone did to record reviews (see previous explanation) on the “copy editing” end. In the ancient 1971-72-73 days, I didn’t even have a telephone in my $50/mo college garage apartment (with personal bathrom/shower, let it be said), just access to a phone inside the front house…communication from Jon Landau at Rolling Stone came in the form of tiny 1-page memos in the mail. And vice versa.

Scott:   How or why did you start writing about music? Was it a big ambition of yours when you were younger?

Mike:   Actually, it was a complete accident. In 12th grade English class in Fall 1968, one of our weekly “writing assignments” was to write up a “review” of something (TV, movie, stage, music). Being a 15 year-old suburban white boy, fall 1968, of course I was listening hard and heavy to the “blues.” The Small Faces, Procol Harum, and Bonzo Dog Band might’ve been the only rock bands with albums out that year/season that I liked…Beatles, Stones, and Hendrix were utterly useless by the end of ’68, so Howlin’ Wolf, Paul Butterfield, and Lightnin’ Slim it was (and also my first introduction to “catalogue” albums, graduating the next year to the catalogs of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, etc.). Anyway it seemed a conspicuous omission to my mind that Rolling Stone (which I got through the mail, it was not available on Arkansas newsstands) had never reviewed John Mayall’s Hard Road album with Peter Green. So I wrote up a review for the English class assignment, and what the hell, never mind that the album was a year old, also sent it in to Rolling Stone (who did not have a “review editor,” but instead a back-page box requesting submissions). They actually ran it, rotten grammar and hyperbole and all (no cash payment). The following spring of ’69, I sent in a review of some album or other I had in hand, and not only did a small cash payment come back, but a note from their first “review editor” ever, Greil Marcus. He was angling for someone to do an interview with (Dylan producer) Bob Johnston in Nashville, and figured Little Rock was a day’s drive away on the interstate system…I had to explain that I was a 16 year old high school senior, and even tho’ possessed a 1966 Chevy Nova had a very tight schedule and a ‘term paper’ to write, etc. So you can see, my motivation to be a Cameron Crowe was nil from the git go.

Anyway, I only wrote a few record reviews during Marcus’s year as editor. When Jon Landau came in in Oct. 1970 as the new review editor, he immediately pegged me as a guy who liked “English pop” (of the Badfinger, Raspberries type) and hard rock/heavy metal. He had a gap in those categories (for reviewers) or something. And actually I’m a little ahead of myself here…it was later in the May 1971 Creem, reviewing the first Sir Lord Baltimore album (released the first week of Feb 1971, just two weeks ahead of Sabbath’s Paranoid, so let’s figure the review of my promo copy was typed up in Feb. in my Univ of Texas at Austin dorm room), that I threw down the phrase “heavy metal” in its first use in the rock press ever (outside of the Steppenwolf lyric) as a descriptive term. Yep, all blame and shame goes to me. That was also the Creem issue where Dave Marsh coined the phrase “punk rock” in a column about seeing a Question Mark & The Mysterians club gig…something was definitely in American’s drinking water that month.

Scott:   How did your relationship with Rolling Stone evolve over the years? Did they have you pegged for certain types or reviews? Were you in their “good books,” so to speak?

Mike:   No evolution, I was a frequent/regular record reviewer only during the long Jon Landau era, fall 1970 – summer 1973.

Scott:   Is ‘Metal Mike’ your own invention? How did that come about?

Mike:   Simple question, Black Sabbath and Grand Funk were parked on my stereo a huge amount of time during the last half of 1971, my junior year at Univ of Texas at Austin. You know how college nicknames go, “Metal Mike” stuck pretty quick, and has never really left the building.

Scott:   How do you think the genre of rock crit has evolved over the last thirty or so years? Are there any essential differences between writing reviews in 2001 than there were writing reviews in 1971?

Mike:   As someone who avidly follows a daft VH1 show like, say, Bands On the Run, it has just occurred to me that that disqualifies me from having a legitimate opinion on anything except, uh, maybe which WNBA team’s gonna win the Western Conference this year. But I’ll be glad to ponder the endless musical crimes and hilarities of Asswhacker, Flickermydickonastick, and Harlot (Soulcracker, Flickerstick, and Harlow to you civilians) with anyone who gives me a beer. I know a helluva lot more about them than about Radiohead.

Scott:   What do you make of DeRogatis’s thesis (more or less) in Let it Blurt that rock criticism has been ‘sold out,’ gone downhill since the early ’80s? Is he onto something with that or is he missing the boat entirely?

Mike:   Whoa, I’d say he’s almost ten years off. On my radar the boat went out to sea waaaay before Duran Duran showed up.

Scott:   What/where are the best things happening in rock criticism right now? What/where are the worst things happening in rock criticism right now?

Mike:   Since I don’t even know which sea the aforementioned boat got lost in, I don’t have the slightest idea what a possible answer to this question might be.

Scott:   How did your stint as a music critic influence your music in the Angry Samoans (if at all)?

Mike:   Didn’t, no cross-influence between the two. You have to remember my original (and favorite) instrument is drums, the non-musician slot of the breed.

Scott:   How has your work in the Angry Samoans influenced the way you write about music now (if at all)?

Mike:   Didn’t, since both hobbies were sort of accidental or incidental in the first place. Playing in a band I got a tiny glimpse into what mind-racking mental torture recording is on the back-end of overdubbed-vocals and mixing, endless decisions of “is this good enough” jammed against a small budget of money and time.

Scott:   What sort of ‘real jobs’–if any–have you held in your life, apart from the Angry Samoans and rock criticism? Have any of these jobs been informed by your writing or your music? (And vice versa.)

Mike:   My ‘real’ career would be 24 years and counting in the accounting profession, since picking up the degree in May 1977. I loaded up my 401(k) and IRA “retirement funds” to such a compulsive degree that two years ago I got the luxury of cutting back to half-time work (to just cover expenses) and have since been living the life of Reily listening to Britney tracks back home at 2 P.M. any day of the week.

Scott:   In an interview in Hangnail, you said: “DO NOT SPEND your time practicing loud music in a small practice space in a rock band–this is bad for your ears. I spent my time instead (for about 23, 24 years) writing songs.” Do you still write songs? And what’s harder, writing songs or writing reviews?

Mike:   Ah, I never really did quite enough volume of “rock writing” to be able to compare the two. Songwriting, though, was something I periodically busted my ass on and eventually wound up with over 1,000 finished rock songs (on paper & tape)–over about 23 or 24 years of work. Music is easier for me than words/lyrics, so the combination of being a solitary writer (by circumstance) doing both ends of the work was really a big headpain at times. I’ll still write a crummy song, or even a good one, anytime a guitar is in my hand, but the compulsive exercise of spiffing it up and then committing it to paper and tape was “retired” at some point after the 1000th song. And yeah, there were a couple albums’ worth of good songs that my band never got around to learning or recording before we semi-retired into the e-z club/hall headlining slot of being an “oldies” act (in the last 4 or 5 years)…which certainly gave LOTS of insight into what it must’ve been like to be Chuck Berry, or the Who, or any other act with a core of 15 old songs that’s all most of the audience is ever gonna be interested in hearing.

Scott:   Did the Angry Samoans get many bad reviews in their heyday? What was your response to them at the time? Did bad reviews sting, or were you prepared for them given your experience on the other side of the fence?

Mike:   American punk rock was mostly verboten from the mainstream press during the ’80s, so as curator of “printed matter” that box was 90% from all the fanzines and oddball magazines. The interesting thing was that when you do albums that are distinctly different from each other, a mere four in our case, the takes on them (in print) in the “career summary” type articles is all over the place. Lot of people/writers even preferred the one (or two) that sucked…or maybe just the style they were in, I guess.

Scott:   Which rock writers have most excited you over the years?

Mike:   Ah, since “entertainment writing” is the dregs of the writing world, I don’t have a whole lot of incisive commentary here. Back with the late ’60s – mid ’70s writers, my favorites were Nick Kent of NME for journalistic ability, and Lenny Kaye for style (his tilt towards a historical bent and a ‘fannish’ tone of voice). I’d agree with Lester Bangs himself that his writing mostly went in the tank after he moved to Michigan and lost his “outsider” perspective. But, ‘Lester Bangs’ is one of the great sounding names of all time, so if they’re gonna canonize a rock writer I can’t think of a better suggestion.

Actually, if you remember that VH1 panel-type show with a handful of writers discussing the topic of the day, there was a guy on there named J.D. Considine (from Baltimore) who was really entertaining, kinda iconoclastic. This past year I noticed a couple talking heads on the current VH1 shows that’re pretty funny and actually from Rolling Stone (usually being asked about pop or rock music…those dopey “Year In Music 2000…1999…1998″ specials).

But if I may render one and one opinion only about rock writing past or present, the funniest and thereby best thing ever written under the auspices of “rock writing” was the original printing of the Paperback Writer book by Mark Shipper (a private pressing, mid-late ’70s). When a major publisher later put it out they cheezed out and deleted or messed up a lot of the hilarious graphics so I don’t recommend the later pressing. For those not “in the know,” the book was a phoney-history of the Beatles culminating in a 1977 Beatles reunion tour/album (that bombs and they wind up opening at the bottom of Peter Frampton bills)

Scott:   If you were going to form a band with some rock critics now, who would they be? And please try and describe the music you would play.

Mike:   If I was in a band with actual “rock critics,” we’d do songs like, “Eric Clapton Sucks” and, “Styx Are The Worst Fucking Band Of All Time,” to the tunes/music of cover songs. I’ve always liked cover songs. Wouldn’t matter who was in the band. You know a song called “Eric Clapton Sucks” played by rock critics is gonna be good.

Scott:   What article or review of yours is your personal favorite; and can you summarize what you were trying to say in it?

Mike:   Ah, easy, the long endless Britney diary-type spread (for the Oops album) in last year’s Village Voice. What it was was, the first 2,000 words were literally culled/chosen by Chuck (Eddy) from a very sizable collection of e-mails and even internet postings (to message boards), me being a quite fixated Britney/Max observer from Day 1. Chuck found/pulled some funny stuff from long-forgotten e-mails that I’d totally forgotten. The last 30-40% of the spread was of course self-consciously written, starting from the single (“Oops”) and “SNL” appearance and pre-album promo…but reading it cold for the first time, like an unsuspecting reader, was really funny (since I had no idea what was contained, and had told ed. Chuck to not show/send any of it to me). My inarguable qualification for being the official rockwrite Britney-head was of course accidentally trolling up (in the local record store 50-cent cassette junk bin) a copy of the Summer 1998 shopping-mall-tour cassette sampler long before the “Baby One More Time” single. I still regard the 6 uptempo cuts from Sweden (on the Oops album) as a milestone in modern pop music, so any Max Martin nay-sayers do not tangle with me.

Scott:   What’s your favorite most pretentious album of all-time?

Mike:   That’s easy, I’d have to go with the first Aorta album (on Columbia, 1969). It’s utterly daft/wack, about everything you would expect or hope for from a Windy City psych-album. It charted for eight weeks that spring, so there’s no reason for anyone not to own a copy.

Scott:   Being in Canada, I’ve never heard Radio Disney. Is it still, a year or so after your Voice epic appeared, as appealing? Do you still hear segues that you would describe as “surreal”?

Mike:   Unfortunately, the playlist got tightened up a lot sometime around the end of Year 2000, with their oldies mix suffering particularly.

Scott:    What are your most sublime movie-music moments? (I’m thinking here of music as ‘soundtrack’ rather than foreground…i.e, not scenes featuring bands playing songs.)

Mike:   This is the one question in this Q/A collection that has me scratching my head, so it’s the one question I’m throwing out. Swear ta god, I keep thinking of the end of Never Been Kissed where Drew Barrymore goes all smootchie to the Beach Boys “Don’t Worry Baby.” And I liked lots of the music/songs as ‘backdrop’ in last year’s Detroit Rock City…I’d say I’m disqualified entirely from even commenting on music in movies.

Scott:   Favourite version of “The Locomotion”?

Mike:   Kylie’s version is a seriously great SAW (Stock, Aitken, Waterman) production, so I’d have to count hers as a tie with the very different Little Eva original. Grand Funk’s version is only fit to torture people with.

Scott:   Forced to choose on a desert island: Tiffany’s or Tommy James & the Shondells’ “I Think We’re Alone Now”?

Mike:   I like ‘em both.

Here and there Writing the Record lives up to its billing as a provocative examination of Village Voice critics as reflectors on as well as reflections of the intersection of popular music, the rise of hype, and left-wing politics during the ‘60s and beyond. But overall Powers’s mission is woodenly academic: rock criticism is “not merely” the “invention of a small number of individuals: it is a genre and the critic has a habitus, for which there are individual and historical but also collective and theoretical explanations.” The latter (collective and theoretical) explanations predictably wind up overwhelming the former. Making rock criticism safe for theory (“important forerunners of the academic study of popular culture”) undercuts any hope of seeing the incisive reviews of Goldstein and Christgau treated as a crucial part of American intellectual history; instead, they are cleared as source material for seminar room discussions about rock reviewing and the history of popular music.

Elsewhere Marx notes that the book is best when Powers “looks at the specifics in the writing of the critics. How did Goldstein discriminate strong rock music from the weak? How did changes in counterculture politics as well as music marketing influence how he articulated his judgments? In what ways does he remain a model for rock criticism?”

More on all this later, perhaps.

By Steven Ward (June 2001)

glenn mcdonald is one of the most important rock critics working in the field today, though maybe “working” is not a good word; he does not get paid a cent for his insightful and very personal journalism.

If I could only chose the writing of one rock critic to bring with me to a desert island, glenn would be my first choice. (You see, I would have access to all the CDs I want on my desert island and glenn could help me pick and choose.)

Even though some publications have invited glenn to contribute, he won’t do it. A Boston-area software designer, mcdonald prefers to slave away at his computer every Wednesday night and create his fiercely independent, weekly on-line music column, The War Against Silence. No editors, no advertising and no compromises. This may be unheard of in today’s state of music journalism, but it is being practised week in and week out by mcdonald.

You know the pure joy and emotion you can feel after listening to a piece of music? Remember how you used to feel the same way after reading a piece of rock criticism? The kind of writing that made you want to go out and buy a record? Not because it was cool but because the writer made you feel like the record in question was just perfect for you. Something you would just love.

The writing of glenn mcdonald will make you want to go out and browse the aisles of your favorite record store. He still gets a jolt from the thrill of discovery when buying CDs. glenn’s writing will make you want to rediscover that jolt as well.

During the following e-mail interview, mcdonald talks about his column and music writing in general. His take on rock criticism may be the freshest slant that’s ever been published at rockcritics.com. But don’t take my word for it — read on…

steven:   For those that don’t know, you write a very personal online music column each week about CDs you have recently got hold of. Although your columns are very autobiographical in nature, you never let that aspect grab hold of describing the music and what it sounds like. That’s one of your strengths in my opinion, always writing about what the music sounds like as well as what it means to you. Do you agree with that assessment and is it that way by design?

glenn:   Well, I do believe that music reviewing is, at its core, a service industry, or at least it has been historically, or at least it should have been historically. We ought, I think, to have been trying to help readers find music they might enjoy, and to do that we needed to find a way to tell them enough about a record, in terms they could understand and use, that they could make an informed guess about whether buying it was a good risk. We often failed, of course, because reactions to music are intensely subjective and it’s impossible to anticipate when, for example, some particular twitch in a singer’s voice is going to completely alienate a listener who would otherwise seem to be the band’s ideal audience, but in the old world we didn’t have any workable alternatives, so we did what we could. The thing that threatens to render this whole field of endeavor obsolete, however, is that if you’re on the Net you now don’t really need to have music described for you. Bands put sample songs up on their web sites, the online CD stores often let you listen to snippets of every song on the album, and once the major labels get their post-Napster services running we’ll be pretty close, at least within the major-label domain (which is all most people know of popular music, anyway), to radio-on-demand. At that point, detailed written descriptions of music are superfluous and anachronistic. A couple of “if you like Oasis, you might like Travis” links and some clips, and the listener can just make up their own mind.

steven:   Do you consider yourself a music critic–or a rock critic?

glenn:   Sort of. I think the sad truth is that most people writing about music didn’t agree with me about the first purpose of doing so, even in what are now becoming the old days. Far too much criticism tries to be an arbiter of value, in addition to, or even instead of, describing the music and letting the reader/listener supply their own response. Witness the grades and star-ratings nearly everybody puts on their reviews. There’s no such thing as “a B+ album” or a three-and-a-half-star album or whatever. Value is not an internal property of a work of art, so to me grading a record is not just inane and offensive, it demonstrates a profound misunderstanding about how people react to art. An album could be an A+ to one person, on one particular day, because it delivers a completely perfect encapsulation of everything they’re currently asking for from music, but to somebody else, with different needs and prejudices, the same album could be absolutely awful. To the same person who loves it today, it could be merely mediocre three years from now. Real responses to art are complicated and mutable, with all kinds of dependencies and ambivalences and reservations. If you think your job, as a listener or as a critic, is to stamp a C on something, or an A for that matter, all you’ve succeeded in doing is impoverishing your own experience of the music, or if you’re unlucky enough to be influential about it, impoverishing some other people’s experiences of it, as well.

Of course, there’s still the other traditional role of the “critic” (as opposed to the “reviewer”), which is to try to place the work in some sort of larger context, and/or analyze it in a deeper way than a casual, under-informed listener is prepared or willing to, and thus get at some notion of artistic merit, which at least in theory is separate from the question of how valuable it is or isn’t to any particular audience. This can be done with music, but a) almost no popular music criticism actually amounts to this, and b) I don’t even think it would be very interesting if it did. It’s probably possible, for example, for a group of reasonable, knowledgeable people to agree that The Joshua Tree is a work of high artistic merit. It’s a technically proficient implementation of a distinctive and influential aesthetic with a complex and intriguing heritage. But so what? It still may be too slow for you, or too pretentious, or not sexy enough, or any of a hundred other things that mean when you listen to it, your skin crawls, or your attention wanders.

So what’s left? Why write about music at all? I think the worthwhile thing you can still do, and on a good week this is what I’m intending to do in my column, whether I succeed or not, is write about how music moves you, about the ways you find to connect with it, and how you contrive to allow it to affect your understanding of the world, or yourself, or break-ups or gender-politics or the Civil War or something. You can be an object lesson in how to have a more rewarding relationship with music.

steven:   You are not on any record company mailing lists. You buy everything you write about. Why is that? It seems to be some sort of statement of purpose or intent.

glenn:   To be totally precise, I do occasionally get given CDs. I turn down all submission requests, and there’s no mailing address on my web site, but I’m not opposed to gifts from friends, and there are a few people who I’ve become friends with as a result of writing about their music. But in that case it’s a personal matter. Getting boxes of free crap in the mail from strangers, which I thought sounded like paradise when I imagined it as a kid, in the end doesn’t appeal to me at all. I like buying music. It’s my favorite thing to do with money. I like pacing up and down the aisles of record stores, I like coming home and unwrapping the week’s pile of new CDs, I like knowing that my money is part of the reward system for the people who make these records. I might feel differently if I couldn’t afford it, but I’ve got a decent software job and at this point my music-buying is gated by listening time, not money. Which is, in turn, an even more important reason not to get crap in the mail: I barely have time to listen to all the music I purchase for my own reasons. The last way I want to spend that time is putting on albums I didn’t ask for or anticipate and probably, statistically speaking, won’t enjoy. Plus, if somebody sends me something I feel obliged to at least respond, and I really hate writing notes of the form “Sorry, I know you poured two years of your life and soul into this work of art, but I turned it off after three songs because it seemed totally mundane and I don’t think you’re actually a very creative person.”

steven:   What kind of feedback do you get from readers and who do you think your audience is exactly?

glenn:   I get some very intense, emotional feedback, I think for a couple of reasons. One, I write about a lot of fairly obscure bands that don’t get much other coverage, and that certainly don’t otherwise get the kind of detailed attention I give them, so there are quite a few bands for whom my reviews are kind of the definitive treatments by default. If you’re used to being ignored, either as somebody in one of these bands or someone who follows them, it can be pretty cathartic to discover that some stranger in Boston has actually sat down, listened seriously to this record you’d started to think nobody else had even heard, and tried to explain why it’s special. The bigger reason, though, and the source of the most harrowing, confessional feedback I get, is that I do write about myself, and my own fears and hopes and epiphanies, in the course of writing about the music. Some weeks I’m much more of a diarist than a reviewer or a critic, and I think for people who want their lives and their music to mean something, my struggles sometimes resonate.

steven:   Where did the title of your column come from–”The War Against Silence”?

glenn:   It doesn’t have an exact meaning, but I think it’s some kind of a combination of my war against the absence of what seems to me to be the essential personal element from most other music criticism, and music’s war against the inertia of quiet, and perhaps an oblique acknowledgement that at times both of these may be misguided fights. But that makes it sound like I devised the name for the column, and in fact it basically happened the other way around: the phrase occurred to me, and I immediately realized I had to start writing a weekly music review column so that that could be its title. I’m being only slightly facetious. I’d written a lot of reviews before starting the column, all in the form of a book that was meant to be my answer to the Trouser Press and Rolling Stone and Christgau guides, but in its first draft, at least, which is as far as I got in the first year and a half, it wasn’t really comprehensive enough to be a reference work, nor personal enough to be anything else. I wrote it in 1993 and part of 1994, and at the beginning of 1995 I was planning to start on the second draft, incorporating reviews of all the new music I’d found since the first one. When I sat down with it again, though, I realized both that interpolating several hundred new records into the existing organizational structure (it was ordered associatively, not alphabetically) was going to be a logistical nightmare, and that doing so was almost certainly not going to change an unpublishable book into a publishable one. A weekly column was a way out, a way of reducing the problem to something I could fight one small battle at a time.

steven:   Does the writing ever become a chore and does it ever take away the joy from listening to music for pleasure?

glenn:   Not so far, in the first 330 weeks. It’s a physical ordeal at times, since the block of time I have for writing the column is Wednesday nights, which usually means I start writing around 8pm and finish far into the morning, trying to proofread while my vision is blurring from exhaustion. On a good week I go back to work Thursday morning with four hours of sleep. On a bad week, one or two. But the writing itself is necessary to me. It’s part of my process of listening, and I’d do it even if nobody were reading. I started writing that book because I went to my shelves one day to get an old Hunters and Collectors record to listen to, and realized that there were three of them and I couldn’t remember how they were different. The thought of all this music entering my life, affecting me, and then vanishing again, without leaving some kind of trace, terrified me. If my memory were better, maybe I wouldn’t need to do this, but it isn’t, and I don’t know of any better way to store these experiences.

steven:   Tell me about your music writing influences–favorite rock critics and magazines you read in your formative years and what music critics, writers and magazines do you like to read today?

glenn:   I didn’t read about music in my formative years. Up until I started working for a living, I never had enough money to buy more than a small fraction of the records I knew about from radio and friends, so reading about other bands I didn’t have any good way of hearing wasn’t useful. And spending valuable record-money on magazines would have been the height of Pyrrhic ridiculousness. I vividly remember the first time I bought a record because of something I read about it, but it was Laurie Anderson’s Big Science, and I bought it because of an article in some audio-gear magazine about the mechanics of her tape-bow violin. I subscribed to Q for many years, later, but I never liked their smug writing style and basically skimmed it for UK new-release info, and cancelled my subscription once I realized that I could get all the UK info I needed from the net. The only music magazine I subscribe to now is ICE, which obviously isn’t criticism. Most music criticism just makes me angry. Magazines too often try to homogenize their writers, either by restrictions and editing or just by rolling so many of them together that it’s nearly impossible to make sense of individual personalities. I’d rather read about music on mailing lists and discussion boards and random web sites, where people aren’t afraid to care about what they’re saying, and have the luxury of being themselves.

steven:   Have any famous or professional rock critics ever gotten in touch with you about your writing or opinions about music?

glenn:   Yes, a few have. Most prominently, Christgau once mentioned my positive review of Paula Cole’s This Fire in the course of writing her off as worthless. I voted in the Pazz & Jop for the first time this year, and did this Critical Alignment Ratings analysis of the poll, afterwards, that you’ve got a link to on your site, after which I heard from a lot of other voters. I’ve had offers to write reviews for four or five real outlets, depending on your definition of “real”, but I’m pretty attached to my independence, and the prospect of writing a few one-off reviews for the Village Voice or the like is not very appealing. I’m not going to do that instead of writing my own column, and there are too many other things I want to do with my time for me to do it in addition.

steven:   I know you love Marillion, Big Country and Tori Amos? Tell me what it is about these musicians that move you and what other bands or artists move you?

glenn:   The other two from my long-standing top-five are Game Theory/The Loud Family and Kate Bush. Kate hasn’t figured into my column very much, since she hasn’t made any new records since I began writing it, but in the other four cases I’ve spent a lot of words trying to say what it is that moves me about each of them. They’re very different cases to me. In general, I think I respond most strongly to thoughtfulness and vivid personal presence. I like to feel that an artist is trying to understand something, and maybe even trying to represent some sort of approach to understanding, not just selling units of entertainment. I react very badly to anything I perceive as insincerity. If I have to choose between melody and rhythm, I’ll take melody. I hate the blues. I hate joke songs. I don’t drink or do any drugs, so I’m not very big on music that’s meant as accompaniment to intoxication.

The next band on my personal chart, after those five, is probably Low, and as live performers Ida, Mecca Normal and Emm Gryner are close behind. I’m an ardent Roxette fan. I love ABBA, the Alarm, American Music Club, Aube, Black Sabbath, Billy Bragg, the Chameleons, Beth Nielsen Chapman, the Comsat Angels, Crowded House, Del Amitri, Emmylou Harris, the Icicle Works, IQ, the Jam, Cyndi Lauper, the Magnetic Fields, Magnum, Manic Street Preachers, New Model Army, Pop Art and Smart Brown Handbag, Runrig, Rush, Richard Shindell, Jane Siberry, Talk Talk, Yes and probably a hundred others nearly as much. I think Alanis is great. I still believe Jewel has some brilliant records in her, although she’s trying very hard to convince me otherwise. I’ve offered to marry Juliana Hatfield, and to write lyrics for Lita Ford. I don’t have any trouble finding things to be moved by.

steven:   Would you or have you ever considered freelancing for a living or trying to get a conventional job in music journalism?

glenn:   No. I have a horror of screwing up one of the things I love most in the world by trying to make it into a source of income, especially since music-journalism seems particularly ill-suited for that. Software design is a good profession for me, because I’m good at it and I care that it’s done well and I think it matters, but it’s not self-expression to me, so if business contingencies or customer pressures force us to go against my design instincts it bothers me, but I can accept it without feeling like my personal identity is at stake.

steven:   What’s your opinion of the current state of rock criticism?

glenn:   Beats me, I hate most rock criticism too violently to have a very good perspective on the field. It feels to me, from my own limited and subjective experience, like the bulk of mainstream writing about music is just journalism, at this point, and most of the rest of it amounts to a contest to see who can piss on things with the most elegant arc. It seems like everything polarizes into sycophancy or superciliousness. I think it’s incredibly important that there be a intellectual and aesthetic dialog about popular music, but I rarely read anything that seems to be trying to be a part of it. Fortunately, popular music carries on its own conversation about itself, so virtually any insight a critic might have stated, some other record will come along and demonstrate.

steven:   Tell me your favorite five records of all time and an album that you would take with you to a desert island if you could only take one (no box sets please)?

glenn:   As you know if you’ve waded through much of my column, reduction isn’t really my forte. When I did a Desert Island Disk list for my 100th issue, I allowed myself 100 albums and 100 more stray songs. The shortest list I can give you has eight: Tori’s from the choirgirl hotel, Big Country’s Steeltown, Kate’s Hounds of Love, Game Theory’sLolita Nation and Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood, to have one album for each of them, and then Roxette’s Don’t Bore Us–Get to the Chorus!, Runrig’s Amazing Thingsand Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. If I had to call one of these the “best”, it would probably be Spirit of Eden, but that’s an album about quiet and empty spaces, and if I were stranded on a desert island neither of those would be in short supply. Amazing Things is the most life-affirming work of art I know of, but if I were fighting for my daily survival, I don’t think ennui and cynicism would be the issue. If I’m going to be there alone, Misplaced Childhood is too romantic, and Lolita Nation is too similar to what already goes on inside my own head. from the choirgirl hotel, on the other hand, is too alien, and Hounds of Love is too detached. And Steeltown I long ago memorized, so bringing it seems a little superfluous. It’s Roxette, then, by elimination. Which means that when you finally arrive to rescue me, depending on my mood, you’ll either be greeted with an insanely cheerful “Hello!, you fool!, I love you!”, or else a sardonic shrug and “She Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”

• the pioneering disco/dance critic Michael (a.k.a. D.D.) Freedberg is reprinting a bunch of his reviews from the (now defunct) Boston Phoenix, among other things, including politics
• the pioneering, Roxy-discovering British critic, Richard Williams, is blogging at length about music at The Blue Moment

Freedberg and Williams were both previously featured in rockcritics (those interviews will eventually make their way onto this server as well).

[Goldstein] was and presumably still is a man whose capacious enthusiasms leave him vulnerable to big disappointments. He was so disenchanted with Utopia’s failure to materialize that he bailed on being a rock critic six months before Woodstock. Not many people today even remember he was one, let alone the earliest influential one. Voice readers of my generation probably associate him far more with the paper’s determined and valiant pro-gay advocacy in the ’70s and ’80s, his main beat after he came out himself.

Yet Goldstein did a lot to define and articulate not only rock’s most radical aspirations, but — crucially — the abiding terms of disenchantment. The vexed concepts he wrestled with — “authenticity,” “commercialism,” and so on — were still bedeviling Kurt Cobain two decades later. I’d never realized how much he created the template for the trajectory of idealism and disillusionment I and many others retraced when, in our case, the Great Punk Rock Revolution went pffft. But you can just as easily fill in “When the Beatles broke up,” “When Al Green found Jesus” — or “When Kurt Cobain died,” come to think of it. Later generations would learn to disguise how much it hurt every time by making jokes about jumping the shark.”

- Tom Carson, When Rock Criticism Found its Voice, a review of Devon Powers’s (aforementioned) book on Christgau, Goldstein, and the Voice.

By Steven Ward (May 2001)

If anyone out there has a million dollars and wants to start a music magazine, please let Ira Robbins know about it. Robbins, the co-founder and co-editor of Trouser Press, has said that a million dollars would be the only way anyone could talk him into running a music magazine again. It’s not that he wasn’t any good at it — in fact, Trouser Press quickly grew from a stapled fanzine with a devoted cult following to a glossy monthly magazine that was as good or better than competitors Rolling Stone and Musician at certain times in their publishing histories. For 10 years, from 1974 to 1984, Trouser Press worked towards becoming the “alternative” magazine of its day — a precursor to the early Spin, back when that magazine was any good.

In the mid-’70s, Robbins, the late Karen Rose, and co-founder Dave Schulps started Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press to start championing English music which the conventional rock press was ignoring. Trouser Press writers and editors went to work, telling the world about the Who, King Crimson and Roxy Music. They did not worship at the feet of ’70s critical darling, Bruce Springsteen. (Robbins said he was never a fan.)

When the magazine folded under financial and cultural pressure (MTV had just started and it was forcefully taking over the Trouser Press niche), Robbins continued his crusade with a series ofTrouser Press record guides. Now into its fifth edition, Robbins’s books have become the standard alternative music guides for music fans and rock writers.

Today, Robbins works in syndicated radio and freelances for Mojo, Salon.com, and other publications.

In the following e-mail interview, Robbins talks about the history of Trouser Press, his favorite rock mags and writers, the problem of being pigeonholed as an “alternative” music critic, and the possible future of Trouser Press on-line.

Steven:   Trouser Press was a rock fanzine you started with Dave Schulps in 1974. The fanzine quickly turned into a professionally done and well-respected rock magazine that was forced to close almost 10 years later in 1984 because of financial pressure. Do you miss putting out a monthly music magazine and do you think you would ever get involved in something like that again?

Ira:   Actually, finance was only one of the factors that contributed to my decision to end Trouser Press in 1984. The music world had changed, music media had changed, the lives of the staff had changed, our audience had changed–all of which conspired to make the original thrill of having a credible forum to do with as we saw fit feel more like a Sisyphean duty to fill up a bunch of damnably empty pages every month.

The emotional rewards, for me at least, had dissipated in the face of MTV’s ability to make new wave bands come alive, with audio and video, in a way we couldn’t match on paper. Part of why we existed was because commercial American radio completely ignored the bands we cared about, and college radio was only beginning to matter in the new world.

MTV, in its early-’80s infancy, lunged for the colorful (read: new wave) and the video-savvy (that meant English, since the U.K. use of video to promote bands on TV was already established, albeit not in such a concentrated way) acts–Adam Ant, Duran Duran, Stray Cats (Americans who had started their career in London), Culture Club, the Cure, Depeche Mode, et al. That wasn’t all we did, but they stepped on our toes a lot.

I was frustrated at our fiscal insecurity and, turning 30 after 10 years of doing Trouser Press and nothing else, I discovered that real life, adult life, couldn’t be postponed indefinitely. Plus there was only so much rejection of the mainstream possible if staying in business was a goal. We unintentionally had a new audience–teenyboppers excited by our coverage of their faves but too young to share our sensibilities and our skepticism: one cover story on Duran Duran that attacked the band’s flaws caused howling letters of disillusionment and anger from kids who just wanted the good news on how cute they were. How could we put them on the cover and not worship them? It made sense to us–a big story is a big story, and a band is a mix of good and bad. Little did we know that no one else thought that way. These days, what serious publication dares think that way?

Which brings me to the question you actually asked–do I miss it? Sure. It was fun to publish completely independent music reportage and criticism. Trouser Press stood for things. Our readers thought of us as a friend with strong opinions. We clearly favored cool bands over old-hat stooges, but we had a real respect for veterans and their complex careers. We (I) loved Cheap Trick, the Who, Roy Wood, Sparks, Todd Rundgren and the Clash. We (I) hated Bruce Springsteen and all the manly Americans who bellowed rather than sang. We thought Patti Smith might be over-rated, and we couldn’t cope with L.A.’s hardcore punk (a generational failure, no doubt). But we had a huge soft spot for the enigmatic charmers in the Residents.

It was all seat-of-the-pants, idiosyncratic, irreverent self-indulgence, but it was wonderful fun. It sucked getting dicked around by record companies, advertisers, distributors and all the rest. I took it all personally–I can vividly recall arriving full of enthusiasm and optimism to our 13th floor office on 5th Avenue on many occasions only to discover that the morning’s mail contained a few bucks in checks on days when the rent, or payroll, or a $20,000 printing bill was due. It wasn’t just the money, really, it was the feeling of powerlessness, that the enterprise we put so much of our lives into could so easily be derailed by another company’s incompetence or bankruptcy, or the record industry suspicion that print advertising wasn’t of any real use to them. It was a tough and lonely battle, externally and internally, and we didn’t learn until it was over how many people we were important to.

Having started out so small and informal, we never grew into a well-run organization–although we got our work done and seemed on top of things, how we did it was always pretty slapdash. When I look back at the old issues, they look and read better to me than I remember them from the creative side. It was that kind of experience–hard to watch the food being prepared but tasty once it got on the table.

So, yeah, there are parts of it I miss. But after it was over I was able to regain friendships that were seriously challenged by working together, and that means a lot to me to this day. I look back and see how well Spin did after we quit–not that the two are in any way connected, but if we’d had some of their money and a bit of encouragement, maybe we could have become a much bigger deal than we ever were. When I decided I’d had enough, I looked around for a buyer, had an accounting firm groom us for a sale, and there were no takers.

I’m glad to have done Trouser Press and glad not to be doing it anymore. Sometimes you have to know when to leave what you’ve done frozen in time and let others carry on. Fortunately, the Trouser Press books–which we started doing in 1983, while the magazine was still up and running–provided 15 added years of continuity for me, the magazine’s name and its ethos.

Would I do it again? I’ve always said if someone wanted to put up a million bucks, providing the business acumen and leave me alone to be the editor, I’d love to run another music magazine. Our slow but steady approach to business was fine in some ways, but a lack of initial capital was ultimately fatal, dooming us to be a small-time operation even when we might have done a lot more. I was never a businessman, and we were never able to get past print-it-they-will-read idealism. Successful magazine publishing, I discovered, involves a lot more than a good editorial “product”–it needs a marketing push, professional salespeople, distribution expertise, muscle, resources and management discipline–none of which we ever had. Oh well.

Steven:   For those who don’t know, Trouser Press was started because you wanted to cover bands that mainstream rock mags were ignoring. That turned out to be a lot of British rock and progressive rock bands in the mid-70s. As time went on, non-mainstream acts turned into the punk/new wave/alternative wing. During the magazine’s last few years, did you consider yourself or the magazine a champion of “alternative” bands or just scribes who were chronicling the bands that were non-mainstream?

Ira:   It’s nice of you to use the verb “champion,” since that is exactly the reason why we put out the magazine. At the outset, our view of what mainstream rock magazines were overlooking included history as well as obscurity, so we latched onto the past (namely British Invasion bands) as well as pub rock, prog-rock and assorted marginal artists few publications cared about. But we were hardly doctrinaire about it. (As you may recall, both Genesis and King Crimson were considered prog bands at the time.) In the first two years (12 issues) of what was initially known as Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press, we covered the Who, Mott the Hoople, Todd Rundgren, Peter Frampton, Steve Harley, Marc Bolan, Brian Eno, the Rolling Stones, Status Quo and Roxy Music–among others.

Confession: As the mid-70s wore on, we found ourselves covering bands we knew we were supposed to care about but actually didn’t (privately, we referred to them, using a bit of borrowed British slang, as “wallies”). I was opposed to making too much of the New York underground scene we all loved and took part in, because we didn’t want to be seen as locally obsessed. It wasn’t as if bands like Blondie or Television or Talking Heads would ever escape the Bowery (as I foolishly believed) and be able to be heard by anyone outside the metropolitan New York area. (Bear in mind that most CBGB/Max’s groups never released any independent records, and major labels were very slow to come calling. Then came the deluge, and in retrospect we quickly found out how naïve that view had been.)

Flash forward to the early ’80s. New wave had become new romantic; the class of ’77 was either dead or digging itself into a rut of decreasing quality and originality. The pop stars we could stomach–Adam Ant, Go-Gos, Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper, Madness, Squeeze, Stray Cats–were just that, pop stars, which made them less emotionally rewarding to champion. U2, R.E.M., Blondie and others were numerically significant AND good, but there weren’t enough of them for a monthly. So, yes, in a sense we were phoning it some of the time, and that hypocrisy really made us lose enthusiasm for the whole enterprise. Meanwhile, we were somewhat removed from the indie rock stuff that was exciting–the Dead Kennedys, Neighborhoods, X and Pere Ubu were cool by us, but Black Flag was really not appealing to me musically in 1982. They sounded like the era we’d just come out of, minus the insight and credibility. (OK, so I was wrong about that, too.)

Steven:   For better or worse, when I think of a rock critic who specializes in new wave or alternative music, I automatically think of Ira Robbins. Do you think you have been unfairly tagged with that title or do you think the connection is an apt one?

Ira:   Unfair but hardly unwarranted. My musical interests, taste and areas of expertise, I’m happy to say, extend further than A Flock of Seagulls to the Butthole Surfers, but I suppose we all have to be typecast for something, so I can’t really complain. (And I did title the first Trouser Press book a “guide to new wave records,” so who am I to quibble?)

Long before there were skinny-tie bands, I was devoted as a fan and journalist to the Who. (When I handed Pete Townshend a copy of Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press #3, the second issue of ours to feature his band on the cover, in 1974, he took it to be a Who fanzine rather than a generalist rock magazine.) I’ve cared about Bob Dylan, blues, soul, folk music and British rock of the ’60s my whole sentient life–one of my best recent CD purchases was an old Canned Heat live album I had worn out on vinyl. Glam/glitter is also a favorite era of mine (Roxy Music/Slade/T. Rex), and I also love old-school hip-hop, Blossom Dearie, bluegrass, smart singer-songwriters and Humble Pie.

I would hate for people to assume, based on my writing and editing work, that I woke up in the mid-’70s, decided the Vapors were the bomb and never gave it another thought. By the time Elvis, the Pistols, Clash, Stranglers, Vibrators, Damned, Buzzcocks, Pere Ubu, Devo, etc. crossed my radar, I’d been a professional music journalist for five years and a devoted rock and roll fanatic for 15. And I’ve kept involved, active and enthusiastic to this day. I’ve co-produced a J. Geils compilation, written liner notes for Yardbirds reissues and the Electric Light Orchestra box set, reviewed the Broadsides collection and done a lot of other things regarding music–all because I wanted to.

Steven:   Tell me about your favorite rock magazines in the early ’70s. What were you reading before you started Trouser Press and what rock critics were your favorites? Which ones influenced you?

Ira:   I have trouble recollecting exactly what I was reading in those days, but I can tell you with some surety that future Dictator Scott Kempner turned me on to Creem in high school, and I found that very inspiring. I was desperate to write for it, and sent them a couple of pitch letters/spec submissions which elicited encouraging scrawled notes (in red pen, as I recall) from Lester Bangs. But my classmate Hank Frank was the first to get a record review–of a Sparks LP, I think it was–published. I was green with envy! By 1971, I was buying Melody Maker and subscribing to the New Musical Express (which came months late, via sea mail, rolled into a baton-like tube). In 12th grade, future TPco-founder Dave Schulps and I would read it furtively behind the large fume-gathering hoods on our desks in an elective chemistry course at Bronx Science that year. I had readHit Parader and 16 Magazine occasionally as a kid. (I recall how the late 16 editrix Gloria Stavers, a fascinating and wonderful woman who we later persuaded to write a Doors article for Trouser Press, would manage to slip names like John Coltrane and Al Jackson Junior into her pages, along with ads, for some instrument company, that pictured Frank Zappa–and you thought it was all the Monkees and Man From U.N.C.L.E.!) Creem was a revelation. Rolling Stone meant nothing to me (unless the Who was on the cover), and continued not to for years–I only got interested when my ambitions as a writer grew to see it as a magazine I’d like to write for. (Which I had.)

The magazines that really led to our thinking about Trouser Press were ZigZag (genealogical history, not an incomprehensible enthusiasm for the wrong kinds of American rock), Crawdaddy (general excellence), Bomp! (record collecting and discographies), Phonograph Record Magazine (serious and entertaining scribing), Alan Betrock’s Rock Marketplace (the mail auction ad business of which we took over when Alan folded it to launch New York Rocker–this was before Goldmine became the ne plus ultra of that realm), Let It Rock and of course the British weeklies.

Dave Schulps and I discovered that the New York Public Library owned a collection of Melody Maker, going back for decades, on microfilm. Dave had this idea of researching British rock using them, so we spent untold hours at the Lincoln Center library, going cross-eyed and seasick as the scratchy old images raced by, writing down every British musician we could find reference to, which bands they had been in, and when. Dave came up with a coding system for instrumentation which I use in note-taking to this day: G/V/K/Y/B/D–guitar, vocals, keyboards, synthesizer, bass, drums–etc. We would write this stuff on sheets of notebook paper, listed vaguely alphabetically, by musician’s name, and attempt to put their careers in chronological order. Then we would go to the stores that sold cutouts and look up the names on records’ back covers to see what we could add to our knowledge base and our record collections.

Dave–who I hasten to add turned me on to the Bonzo Dog Band, Roxy Music, Sparks and a whole of other profoundly formative music–was a fiend for this stuff, and we both learned a lot of bizarre details we would later trot out at interviews and frequently shock subjects with the extent of our knowledge of their careers. (The same idea later became a series of books called Rock Record. But we did it first.)

Steven:   If guys like Robert Christgau and Greil Marcus were considered academics and Lester Bangs and Richard Meltzer were considered gonzo writers, would it be fair to say that the stuff you were doing–and your writers at Trouser Press–was more historical stuff. Maybe like Lenny Kaye and Greg Shaw were doing at the time?

Ira:   Only at the beginning. As TP went along, especially when the underground scene and new wave started making contemporary music good and exciting again, our emphasis on history faded out. When we started, in 1974, glam was mostly done and there really was a lull in innovation and novelty. So history made us feel like we were doing something valuable–anyway, it was how we learned about music, and we were thirsty for info on what had gone before (in the ’60s, at least. There wasn’t much a whole lot of acknowledged pre-Beatles enthusiasm in our house.) But once things in the music world got good, history started feeling musty and ass-backwards as a journalistic ideal, so we downplayed it. But we never cut it out completely.

At the outset, we were fans who recognized that there was a lot we didn’t know. We weren’t serious record collectors (a joke around our place was to say “The more you pay, the better it sounds” as recognition of how out-of-touch serious collectors could get about music as artifact, not art), but we were devotees of rock history who also loved contemporary music. Lenny Kaye was certainly a hero of mine–his liner notes are responsible for my ever-since obsession with Eddie Cochran–and so was Paul Williams, although I wasn’t as fully aware of his work. Most of the music writers I admired were English–Nik Cohn, Roy Hollingworth (who I buttonholed in a champagne-induced stupor, mine if not his, at a legendary Hawkwind after-show party in NYC in ’73 I think it was), Nick Kent, Pete Frame (who became a pal and contributor to TP), Mick Farren (ditto).

We were completely clueless when we started Trouser Press. There were three people involved–me, Dave and the late Karen Rose, who Dave and I met at a guy’s house in Yonkers. We were into the Who. She was into Jeff Beck. We all knew a couple of people and inveigled them into writing for the magazine. The two cornerstone pieces we got under our belts in the first year were a huge multi-part Yardbirds history by a great guy Karen knew or met called Ben Richardson and a fine Animals retrospective by Dave Fricke, who was still living in Philadelphia and was writing for a local weekly. My dad knew his dad through the stamp business, but we met Fricke through a friend of Dave’s who helped out with Trouser Press in the very early days. I met a Puerto Rican guy who lived on Tiebout Avenue in the Bronx who was into the Beatles and especially their bootlegs.

We did what came naturally, which was to write as exhaustively as we could about the bands and music we loved. Pete Townshend wrote back in reply to the first issue. Lenny Kaye contacted us to say he dug the mag. Dave Marsh looked us up and bought us lunch a year or two in. Kathy Miller, who was a pal of Lester’s and a regular contributor toCreem, as well as a former partner in crime of my first wife, the rock photographer (and NY Dolls fan club co-founder) Linda Danna, wrote some great glam-rock profiles for us.

Dave and I had met Richard Meltzer and Nick Tosches at Susan Blond’s office at UA Records when we were both writing for our respective college papers before we started the magazine in early 1974. We sort of knew Meltzer through Scott Kempner (RM actually wrote an article for Fusion magazine that was supposed to be about the high school band me, Dave, Scott and Hank Frank had that got so far as “rehearsing” in my parents’ living room a couple of times, perfecting a version of “Do You Believe in Magic” that no one else ever heard us play. We thought we were called Gorilla, but Meltzer changed all the relevant details and called us Hank Frank and the Hot Dogs in the article. We were still thrilled.) At UA, where he and Tosches were furiously bagging sealed, un-punched promos they could sell, R.–who remained a personal hero of mine until his insane and juvenile screed about Jon Tiven’s decades-old bathroom activities last year–gave us a crucial bit of advice which I remember to this day. (To be honest, I’m completely paraphrasing, since I probably forget his actual words the next day, that’s how awestruck I was.) He told us to make sure you put something in everything you write that’s just for your own amusement, like ending one word with “s-h” and then starting the next with “i-t.” That beats four years in journalism school (something which I never considered) hands down. Thanks, Dick!

We didn’t have any money (the founding capital budget for TOTP was $60 to buy 10 reams of mimeograph paper, a box of stencils and a couple of tubes of black ink), and we had no idea real rock writers were used to working for nothing. We didn’t know any of the name brand writers personally, and were too shy to meet them. (Dave did get chummy with Gordon Fletcher, a Rolling Stone contributor in DC.) We certainly didn’t imagine they’d be interested in our dinky little enterprise, so we got people we knew, or met, or who found us and volunteered to do writing for the magazine. We kind of knew what we liked, so we knew when we were on to good things. Dave and I both did lots of writing–he emerged as one the magazine’s main feature writers once he finished college and came back to New York in 1975–but we were up for almost anything if it seemed credible and worth reading. Within a year of our starting, Jim Green and Scott Isler had joined the staff; Jim as a singles columnist and feature writer (not to mention distribution manager), and Scott as the art director (and editor in training). Both became major contributors to the magazine over the rest of its life.

Steven:   Tell me about your staff at Trouser Press. Did any go on to do bigger things at more mainstream rock mags. For instance, I know Scott Isler went on to do some great stuff at Musician after Trouser Press folded.

Ira:   I’ve always been very proud of our alumni and how they spread into various roles in the industry. Jim Green has written for a lot of publications and done liner notes for Rhino as well as build an incipient acting career. Dave, who now lives in L.A., and I work for the same radio company; he’s done plenty of writing over the years for a lot of different publications in the U.S. and U.K. Tim Sommer, who came to work for us a teenaged intern and stayed to become an indie-rock columnist, has already had several brilliant careers, writing for Sounds, newscasting for VH1, rocking in Hugo Largo, signing Hootie and the Blowfish to Atlantic and so on. John Leland, who was also an indie-rock columnist for TP, was on staff at Newsday and Newsweek, the editor of Details and is now a reporter at the New York Times. Jon Young, who was a contributor for many years, has kept up the good work for numerous publications while working in a real job. Steven Grant, another freelance friend of the family, is a big wheel in the comics world. Joel Webber, our first ad director, co-founded the New Music Seminar, put out some very cool records and became an A&R man at Island Records but died in his early 30s of a congenital heart defect. Steve Korté, our second and final ad director, moved on to an editor’s job at Star Hits magazine and has continued to prosper in other publishing realms.

Steven:   Did you ever have big time rock writers do any work for Trouser Press?

Ira:   Over the life of the magazine, we did publish some big names (Lester Bangs, Pete Frame, Mick Farren, Roy Carr, Gloria Stavers, Chris Salewicz, Dave Marsh), but none of them other than Farren were regular contributors or in any way more than momentarily identified with the magazine. We had some future stars (David Fricke, Kurt Loder, Paul Rambali, Pete Silverton) and some really cool interns (like Fall album cover painter Klaus Castensjold), but by and large we used people we liked. We grew our own.

By the way, although the perception is that women writers were shut out of rock journalism until the post-punk ’80s, we used a lot of women writers, not as a political statement but because they knew their shit and wanted to write for us. Like Creem used to advertise, we didn’t see ourselves as anything special, so we didn’t exclude anybody who could help us. (Plus the magazine was co-founded by a woman.) Toby Goldstein, Marianne Meyer, Karen Schlosberg, MT (Marilyn) Laverty, Kris DeLorenzo, Kathy Miller and Galen Brandt all come immediately to mind, and I’m sure there were others.

Steven:   In connection with the above question, I’ve noticed that you never had guys like Marcus or Christgau write for any of your record guides. The writers are always younger, less-known writers. Was that by design because those writers were more in touch with newer, outside the fringe music or did you want to give those younger writers a chance at publishing some of their music writing?

Ira:   Yes. I don’t like Marcus’s writing at all, and Christgau has his own record guides to do (for which I have, on one or two occasions, loaned him records), so there’s no chance of either of them being involved in a TP book. On the other hand, Neil Strauss, David Fricke, Karen Schoemer, Gary Graff, Greg Kot, Michael Azerrad, Tom Moon, Jim DeRogatis and many other highly regarded, well-established not-entirely young writers have all contributed.

Basically, I’ve always lived and worked outside the rock critic establishment. I’ve never been friends with any of the big shots (except for Lenny Kaye, and Paul Williams, whom I met in the early ’90s) and I’ve never written for them. Nor most of them for me. I started in rock journalism on the outside and have, for better and worse, remained there for most of my career. I’ve never been in the in crowd.

Steven:   What do you think of Bangs and the Gonzo school of rockwrite and Christgau and his more acute approach?

Ira:   Nice but not me. I enjoyed reading Lester when I was a kid; thought his Clash trilogy in the NME was brilliant; rarely believed anything he said but often got a laugh out of the superficial silliness; I don’t suppose, in retrospect, I really understood what he was raving about. I re-read a lot of it when his book came out and was struck by how much I had missed hidden in the blizzard of bluster. Meltzer was always more my kind of loony.

Xgau? I have had both fundamental aesthetic and cultural disagreements with his work as well as enormous respect for it. I suspect that the dean has gone through as much of a growth process as have us mere mortals (though his writing has rarely allowed the possibility of incomplete comprehension or knowledge or insight or foresight, so I can’t say for sure whether he would have ever agreed with that assessment), so maybe it’s more a matter of asynchronous timing than outlook. I was never part of his club–maybe that’s why I didn’t get to be the Village Voice‘s music editor the one time I seriously pursued it. Or it could have been because I didn’t really want to work with someone who had once called me a white supremacist in print.

Steven:   What do you think of rock journalism today? Do you read any rock mags today and are there any newer writers out there that catch your eye?

Ira:   Obviously it’s changed. There’s an astonishing amount of mediocrity in music journalism nowadays–a shocking lack of history and context combined with a congenital audience-pleasing inability to express an independent critical view. I think bad editors have, for good reasons, encouraged a lot of weak writers who have become even worse editors, propagating a downward cycle of incompetence. (That said, the worst editor I have ever worked with was a grizzled old veteran who insisted that everyone should write as incompetently as he did. I tried that for a while but couldn’t hack it and left a very lucrative freelance setup.)

The old values of rock journalism–which, to my mind, are no different than the current values of good journalism in general (like what you see practiced in the New Yorkerunder David Remnick)–have been set aside in favor of a comfortable and profitable collusion between stars, audience and publication. At Trouser Press we always saw ourselves as beholden to no one, and I think that’s largely been lost.

The careerism that emerged once mainstream magazines began covering rock in the ’70s has been a boon and disaster for the field, making it a field one can earn a living in (as opposed to the $10 Creem used to pay, forcing the first wave of writers to live on label largesse and free T-shirts) but encouraging the shallowest of efficient lamebrains who can pitch well and write smoothly but have no original ideas. Considering how many magazines are written largely by freelancers, there’s a major lack of critical depth and strength in a lot of what I read.

Oddly, a lot of the best music journalism is now in daily papers, which once treated pop music like a problem, rather than the music magazines that are devoted to it. I am always happy to read Jon Pareles (by far the finest working critic in America), Greg Kot, Jim DeRogatis, Steve Hochman and Tom Moon, among others. Dave Fricke ofRolling Stone is just as enthusiastic and compelling a writer as he was two decades ago. Tom Sinclair and David Brown both do great work in Entertainment Weekly; I’ve enjoyed Steven Daly’s features in Rolling Stone and Douglas Wolk in the Voice. And while I hasten to note that they are both close friends of mine, I am a big fan of Dave Sprague and Michael Azerrad. I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone blindingly obvious. I’ll think of them later.

Steven:   You’ve put out five editions of your comprehensive and intelligent Trouser Press Record Guide. The last edition, The Trouser Press Guide to ’90s Rock, was published in 1997. From what I understand, you are not working on a sixth edition of the book. Are you going through some kind of withdrawal with no book to work on or is the break a welcome one?

Ira:   No withdrawal. None whatsoever. And I really can’t see doing another, at least not if I have to edit it. Each edition of the book has been harder to do than the previous one, and while I am a glutton for that sort of self-abuse, at this stage of life I’ve actually come to my senses. The amount of work, stress and concentration they require, editing and writing five of these books has done enormous damage to my personal life and psyche, not to mention my ability to earn a living. And the travails of working with a book publisher presents far more frustration than I can endure any longer. The fifth edition, The Trouser Press Guide to ’90s Rock, wound up taking an entire year, seven days a week, at least 14 hours a day, fighting an impossible self-imposed deadline which I met only to have my publisher waste by bringing it to stores after the big winter buying season, which was the whole point of the deadline in the first place.

Steven:   Tell me about what you are doing today. I know you work in radio and your byline crops up from time to time–recently in places like Salon.com and Mojo.

Ira:   In the years since Trouser Press ended, I’ve alternately freelanced and worked three real jobs–as an editor at Video Magazine, the pop critic and music editor of (New York) Newsday and, for the past four years, as the editorial director of MJI Broadcasting, a radio syndication company in New York. I oversee a department that provides music and entertainment news to commercial stations all over the country. As you note, I’ve done some pieces for Salon, a Television feature and a Joey Ramone obituary forMojo, some book reviews for the Hartford Courant and assorted other things when the mood has struck. I’ve also written reviews on and off for Rolling Stone, done stuff forEntertainment Weekly and liner notes for a big Rhino project. I know for a lot of people I’ve gone invisible, but I’m still here. Freelance writing for a living is hard–not just financially, but emotionally and ethically–so I do it now for the fun and exercise, writing for people I like who ask me or give me room to write about things I care about.

Steven:   Tell me about the future of Trouser Press on-line?

Ira:   The site was originally created as a partnership with Sonicnet - I had the “content,” the brand name and the ideas, they had the electronic know-how and resources. It started well but didn’t really go anywhere, and after a series of corporate fish-eating exercises, Sonicnet ended up as part of MTVi, which without any warning or notice near the end of 1999 simply took the site down. They were very nice about giving it back to me, but it took most of a year to get all the registrations transferred etc. So now I have the site back, and have been toying with the next move. There’s the possibility of working with another web site that has expressed interest in a new partnership, or I’ll do it myself. But I’m discovering that to do what I think it should be–all of the contents of the five Trouser Press Record Guides, with some sort of updates for important new releases, plus some archival stuff from old issues of the magazine–is more than I can really do on my own. So I’m kind of mulling and plotting and fiddling with. No timetable. A lot of folks have expressed interest, which is both nice to know and kind of encouraging me to get something done, but I want to do it right, and my available time to devote to it (not to mention web expertise, of which I have very little) is limited.

Steven:   Finally, what is your favorite record of all time. If the question is too hard, how about a top five list?

Ira:   After 40 years of listening to music as a hobby and a profession, I can’t see any way to select one record as a clear favorite, since each one I love means something different to me, stimulates a different part of my being. It would be more practical to name the musical artists who have meant the most to my life. I guess they would be…

The Who, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Elvis Costello and the Clash. And Roxy Music, Cheap Trick, the Bonzo Dog Band, Creation, New York Dolls, Ramones, Sex Pistols, Television Personalities, Velvet Underground, Small Faces, Muddy Waters, the Move, Sam Cooke, Eddie Cochran, Bill Monroe, Marvin Gaye, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.