In the dark days before MP3 blogs and the internets, it was a lot harder to come by music news out of the mainstream. Now put yourself back in 1981 and 14 years old. Even for a kid working in a record store, there were very few outlets to find out what the latest on the art punk heroes from far away. The mainstream music press, which then was Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone and Rolling Stone, took an almost complete pass on the punk revolution and its aftermath. I had three main sources, each of them lovable and flawed in their own ways.
First there was Trouser Press. Today it’s considered one of the ne plus ultra music reviewers of its time, but that’s mostly on the strength of the Trouser Press Record Guide, which is still in print and can now be accessed in full for free. TP was the only national magazine covering the New Wave in any kind of detail with cover stories for the likes of The Clash and Devo.
Nevertheless, during my readership it was still handing covers to Bill Wyman and Genesis. It’s a great reminder of how confusing a time it was for listeners and for the music press. Petty was being marketed as a new waver power poppers like The Police and Squeeze were advertised as cutting edge. Even Billy Joel got in on the act; “It’s Still Rock and Roll To Me,” incredibly, was seen at the time as his punk hit. (Click here to see TP’s bizarre cover choices.) If you wanted the latest on the new wave sounds that managed to fight to the top of the charts, though, Trouser Press was the only choice.
More fun was Damage Magazine, a tabloid-sized punk zine from San Francisco in the manner of Search & Destroy or Slash, which had both already come & gone. Unfortunately I can find nothing anywhere about Damage, not on eBay, not anywhere. It’s just plain gone. If anybody has an archive, let me know!
The most influential for me, though, was Greil Marcus’ column in New West. The magazine was like New York Magazine, West Coast-style. For some reason, the editors gave Marcus completely free rein, and instead of writing about the burgeoning West Coast punk scene – or even the West Coast sound dominating the charts at the time (Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, etc.) – he tackled the fringes of UK post-punk with feature length articles about the likes of Gang Of Four, Delta 5 and the Au Pairs. Then he’d mix all that in with pieces about his love for Jackson Browne’s back-up vocalists. It must have been terribly confusing for readers his age, but for me it made perfect sense. The post-punkers were my bedroom listening, but all that California pop was what my parents were playing when they got stoned while I sat in the backseat of the Volvo. They were deeply separate worlds, but I was living in both.
[Soundtrack]
Public Image – The Cowboy Song.mp3
Trouser Press had a (regular?) column about misheard lyrics. (Creedence: “Don’t go out with Ike / He’s bound to take your wife / There’s a bathroom on the right” Ha ha ha) One time they wrote that they wanted to include the complete lyrics to PiL’s “Cowboy Song,” the B-side to “Public Image,” but space prevented them from doing so. Naturally I was intrigued, so I ran out and found a copy. Well, your guess is as good as mine. Were they kidding? Was this an in joke? I still can’t tell.
Crime – Piss On Your Dog.mp3
Representing Damage Magazine, here’s an example of how it looked and read, but in sonic form: messy, smart and pretty darn funny.
Greil Marcus’s New West columns are collected in In The Fascist Bathroom, originally published as Ranters & Crowd Pleasers. This book is still a fixture in my fascist bathroom.
