Zip It Up! The Best of Trouser Press Magazine 1974-1984 was just released and compiles, all these 40 years later, some of what Kaplan considers the best material, including Pete Townshend’s letter to the magazine after that first issue, which served as a major inspiration for the gang to keep the presses rolling.
One of the early features from the magazine was an interview with The Rolling Stones’ red-headed manager Andrew Loog Oldham. He talked about his early days working with The Beatles but that he needed to leave to give their manager Brian Epstein enough space to do his thing, which led to him going to work with the Stones. He said he didn’t ever change the image of the band although he did suggest clothes for them from time to time. He had never produced a record until he joined the Stones’ entourage, really just becoming their producer by default.
At the time of the interview, Oldham said he still got along with each of the Stones - who he had stopped working with in 1967 during the recording of Their Satanic Majesties Request - except for the already-deceased Brian Jones. He said it was “the first time I’d been in the studio when I didn’t understand what they were doing.” But luckily the split was “before the days when everybody had lawyers ... really very clean.”
The story of Syd Barrett’s long road to oblivion is another early essay in the collection. It tells how younger Syd was a bit of a leader of the Cambridge “freak scene” where all the artist types hung out. He had two cats, Pink and Floyd, who still lived there long after Syd had gone, despite all the acid Syd and friends had given them. Later, in his cat-inspired band, Barrett was often unable to do anything on stage and would completely blank out in the later part of his stint as Pink Floyd’s leader.
Once he was removed from the band, David Gilmour and Roger Waters produced Syd’s first solo album, then Waters couldn’t take it anymore so Gilmour and Rick Wright produced the second one. Gilmour, who had replaced Syd in the Floyd, was ironically really helpful on those solo records, often recording demos that would help better explain to the other musicians what they were supposed to be doing. Those two solo records may have never existed if not for Gilmour. Syd briefly formed a band called Stars, but bad press contributed to his near-complete disappearance from the world - certainly the world of music.
- Nowadays everything is spelled out on the internet, but when Yo La Tengo was starting out, their name was often misspelled as Mo La Tengo, even when they played shows at the nightclub in their hometown of Hoboken, N.J., Maxwell’s.
- The band was originally named A Worrying Thing.
- "Yo La Tengo" came from a book about baseball, which explained how the phrase means “I’ve got it” in Spanish, which is important for baseball players communicating with each other about which one is going for the ball.
So far, I’m not that into the book because it has an overly lengthy section on the history of working-class Hoboken. That part seems inessential, although it's interesting that Maxwell’s was named for the nearby Maxwell House coffee plant that offered aromatic smells nearby.
- Like everyone else who grew up old enough to experience the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Kaplan was influenced. Excessively.
- He and his family grew up in Croton, up the Hudson from Manhattan and Hoboken, and assimilated with a typical secular Jewish life, going to baseball games with his brothers and seeing Country Joe, Fleetwood Mac, and a strip show as his first concert.
This is probably a book worth adding to my rock collection, but for now, this is all I learned from Amazon’s free sample. Good, but I’m not totally gripped yet.
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