In 1974, Ira Robbins was 19 years old and pursuing a degree in electrical engineering at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Because she wanted to become a radio operator and avoid reading and writing at her school. But as an avid and information-hungry fan of his then-underrated British rock band, he was itching to start a fanzine. His father, an elderly left-hander, had a mimeograph machine in the family's Upper West Side apartment, which Robbins and several friends used to print about 300 copies of the publication he named. (24 pages each hand stapled). transoceanic trouser press, named after the Bonzo Dog Band's 1968 song “Put Your Trouser Press on, Baby!” They peddled them for 14 cents a pop outside the Rory Gallagher show at the Academy of Music. Since their pockets were full of change, they decided to do the same thing again. There will also be some writing.
trouser presserThe song, as it came to be called, quickly became a crude but essential entry into these shores of British genres such as prog and new wave, which critics and radio producers had initially despised. It became a means.For a while, he also worked part-time for a microphone import company (he said the other day, “I basically cleaned up the spit coming out of Stevie Wonder's microphone”), but by 1978 trouser presser That was his main job, with an office in Midtown and an annual salary of 12,000 yen. He also began producing his exhaustive Record Guide, a capsule compilation of his reviews of every album in the New Wave world. (His last record guide was published in 1997. Visit the Internet.) Meanwhile, publication of this magazine lasted for 10 years. In 1984, amidst the stress of his divorce and the arrival of MTV (“We were writing about those bands, but we didn't love them”), he performed at Irving Plaza with Del Lord, Jason and the・Holded a party with the Scorchers. And “The Planets'' ceased publication. “The minute we went out of business, we realized how much everyone loved us,” he said. rolling stonein non-condescending parting words, praised Robbins and his colleagues for creating “something as romantic as underground pop-rock.”
Recently, Robbins, now nearing 70, had his music collection buried in the basement of his Park Slope brownstone. The shelves contained more than 30,000 records, almost a third of which were vinyl LPs.All the walls are old trouser presser Cover and communicate.
“It was a letter from Joan Jett telling me to get rid of myself,” he said. He despised her guitar playing. Part of Jett's response read: “I think that puts me in the league of Brian Jones, John Lennon, Greg Keene, and Bruce Springsteen. Thank you!”
There were letters from Pete Townshend (“24 things you should know about the Woo'') and Peter Wolfe (“Sometimes you wanted to hit me over the head with a sledgehammer.'') Ta. trouser presser gags that mock celebrities national lampoon Cover: “Buy this kitten or I'll kill this rock star.'' Next to it was a note from the rock star in question, Patti Smith. “Isla✩I bought the kitten myself.”
Upstairs in his office, Robbins had a vintage Oxford trouser press propped up against a box of Velvet Underground CDs. On his desktop, he opened a database of all the live shows he had ever attended. There was a time when he saw as many as 200 cases a year. He took it seriously. “I've never done drugs,” he said. As a pop music editor in New York in the 1990s. news day, he has written a ton of reviews and features. When he was hired, the newspaper required him to undergo a drug test. “He didn't know if he was going to pass or fail,” he said.
Robbins is planning a party at the Bowery Electric in March for a 50th anniversary compilation titled “The Best of the Trouser Press.” Robbins hopes the compilation will also draw attention to his recently revived name as a small label called Trousers. Press “Books”. “It’s self-published, but it comes with a little blurb,” he said. Stuck at his home during the pandemic and freshly retired from a syndicated radio news job, he found his labors to be retrospective. “I have an accountant's brain,” he said. “I took inventory of my record collection and created an anthology of my writing.'' The anthology, “Music in a Word,'' spans three volumes and 1,000 pages. He had already self-published two of his novels. One was “Kick It Till It Breaks,” a satire of '60s radicalism (“I was part of an organization I didn't want to talk about. It bordered on the Black Panthers”), and then glam-era London. “Marc Bolan Killed in a Crash'' depicts a teenage girl who lives in a house. (“That didn’t sell either.”) This became the imprint’s anchor catalog. After that, he started receiving offers from other writers. He thought, why not? Last year, he published four new titles of his from others, bringing the total to 11. “I say no a lot,” he said. “Either I don’t think it can get any better, or it’s too good for me.” ♦