Zip It Up!: The Best of Trouser Press Magazine 1974 – 1984 (book)

(I wrote this for a print magazine that’s not coming out, and borrowed a few sentences from an issue of Trouser Press I talked about here).

I happened to have been a teenaged Trouser Press subscriber in the early 1980s, but given my youth, had never purchased an issue during their 70s heyday as an Anglophilic rock magazine whose subhead was “America’s Only British Rock Magazine”, and who were actually originally known as the Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press. Theirs was a good niche to mine in the 1970s going head-to-head on the stands with Creem, Circus and Rock Scene, yet starting in 1978 with a Todd Rundgren cover, the magazine started backing away from the UK in favor of the domestic. By the time I was subscribing, their forte was whatever crapola English or American “rock of the 80s” band was burning up MTV, with cover features on Duran Duran, the Stray Cats and Adam Ant egregiously pulling them away from whatever earned credit they’d accumulated.

That said it’s hard to be too overly critical of Trouser Press, as this curated collection makes clear. Editor Ira Robbins emerges through the looking glass of 40 years and peppers his article introductions with the same criticisms you and I might level at his magazine. I’ve heard the man give an articulate account of himself in several quarters, and he’s a mensch and a fan above all else. The magazine was still far too indulgent of whatever was “above board” and on the charts, with a particular focus on power pop, pub rock (they loved them some Ducks Deluxe and Brinsley Schwarz), Elvis Costello, The Ramones and The Who. Granted, the “American Underground” column was a longtime staple and highlight; it’s where I learned about LA’s paisley underground in 1982 – and they even wrote about Flipper, GG Allin and all manner of small-press 45s in the same space. The Kate Bush, P.I.L. and Peter Tosh pieces in particular that are fully reprinted here are excellent reads, as is a 1979 Lou Reed interview that helped cement and lock in place his reputation as the biggest asshole on the planet. 

It’s maybe a little difficult to get the full sway of the magazine and the tenor of their times, even when contracted and excerpted in this heavy 447-page tome. I’d recommend picking up individual pre-1982 back issues of Trouser Press instead to get a far better sense of how each contextualized any given month of rock music in real time.