Those were the days, my friends, when a teenager could walk into a record label’s office, tell them how much you loved a band (let’s say, The Who), walk out with free promo materials (like a black and white 8×10 glossy print), go back home to your parents’ apartment and start a magazine with that pic on the cover.
That’s pretty much how it started for Trouser Press in 1974, when 19 year-old Ira Robbins and his friends Dave Schulps and Karen Rose did just that, producing a music mag that elevated fandom and rock journalism in equal measure for an impressive ten year run.
“We had no plan when we started out,” recalls Robbins. “We never thought beyond the first issue — we didn’t know what we were doing.”
What they did is now chronicled in “Zip It Up! The Best of Trouser Press Magazine,” a 400+ page anthology that is a time capsule of both what was happening back then and how it was covered. The first issue, priced at 25 cents, was produced with support of Robbins’ parents, who lent him their mimeograph machine (“They were old lefties — all the old lefties had mimeo machines,” Robbins jokes) and helped him out with bookkeeping tips when they got further along.
Being devoted anglophiles, the trio originally called their British-centric enterprise the “Trans-Oceanic Trouser Press” in a tip of the hat to the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band’s song “Trouser Press” without having any idea what a trouser press actually was. An eventual meeting with the song’s writer, Roger Ruskin Spear, resulted in their edification on the subject with an instructional drawing by Spear as well (reproduced in the book).
Robbins had a few different jobs that kept him afloat until the rag got up and running, including a stint as Sam Goody’s in Rockefeller Center (in the cassette department) and repairing Neumann microphones, so that engineering degree came in handy after all. Though Trouser Press eventually became a real magazine — leaving behind…
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