An Archaeology of Musician Magazine (Summer Reading Part 2)
The late, great American music magazine (1976 - 1999) has finally been archived online. Dig in.
This 2nd summer reading post is about top shelf music writing on the internet — sorry if you get sand in your device.
I’ll start with Substacks. These aren’t the first I’ve recommended and won’t be the last; there’s lotsa great stuff here if you know where to look.
I mentioned Neko Case’s forthcoming memoir last week. Check out Entering The Lung for a taste of her voice, wit, passions and musical taste, which may surprise you. Her latest entry (paywall dropped) is on mighty power-pop-punks Redd Kross.
Carl Wilson is one of my all-time favorite music writers, in part because his work uses music as a portal to wider truths. See his touchstone book Let’s Talk About Love, which is about personal taste and identity formation while nominally being about Céline Dion (trust me; just read it). This recent essay is about songs and crying, a connection also explored fruitfully by various writers in Brandon Stosuy’s latest, Sad Happens. Have tissues handy.
Finally, Stephen Thomas Erlewine has written volumes for the AllMusic database, plus more expansive things for Pitchfork and elsewhere. I echo Carl’s recommendation; he’s got wide-ranging taste, encyclopedic knowledge, and keeps his spotlight on the music. His latest newsletter surveys worthy new country / country-adjacent LPs and other notables.
So I have a friend researching a book about a fabled music producer known for his ‘60s and ‘70s work, and said friend was raving to me about the broadcast aircheck archive available at the non-commercial, non-profit World Radio History website.
Don’t be put off by the wonky, AOL-startup-disc-era interface — it opens into a research goldmine. Not just airchecks, but archives, many near-complete, of a wild assortment of industry magazines, from Billboard (seriously, they have issues from the 1890s) to the notorious and aptly-named Cash Box, to Hits, The Gavin Report, Walrus!, the pan-European Music & Media, and plenty more. If you want to know how the broadcast sausage was made, or at least how the industry wanted to present that process, you can lose hours, days, and weeks here. (Me, I had a short stint in commercial rock radio — a fill-in gig one summer after college — and pretty much fled screaming. I still do work for public radio, though.)
I figure most New Music + Old Music readers, unless you’re doing research, will be more interested in this recently-posted archive of Musician magazine. Musician was geared towards players and record nuts more interested in, say, how Robert Fripp got that wicked guitar sound on Bowie’s “Heroes” than in what drugs he was taking at the time (English black tea, I’m guessing). The mag published a lot of great writers, working musicians included. As a matter of fact, the King Crimson mastermind and emeritus guitar god, who played on both the original “Heroes” and this ripping live Blondie b-side interviewed the Clash’s Joe Strummer in 1981 for Musician (more a mediated dialogue, but still); in a later piece, he’d extol the brilliance of fellow English guitar guru John McLaughlin. (“Not all his music is my bag of bananas, but I've learned from all of it. And he's still moving. The traditional arguments about technique—no feel, no music— don't work with this man. My hunch is that the streams of notes don't even come close to the tearing, ripping spray of what is trying to get out. Except sometimes.”) In the days before every musician had multiple social media platforms, this sort of thing was revelatory.
Sure, Musician was rock-centric, dude-centric, and way too white, slow to get on board with punk and new wave and indie-rock. But it did, and woke up to hip-hop and electronic music, too. It also gave significant column inches, and cover real-estate, to jazz.
There was a lot of U2, of course. And if things could get gearheady, Musician regularly found a sweet spot between smart writing for curious lay fans and stuff for supernerds. The great Gary Giddins wrote for them on occasion. Ditto Lester Bangs, Gina Arnold, pre-SPIN John Leland, Harry Allen, David Fricke, and mainstay Bill Flanagan, who spearheaded a beautiful 1989 cover package on Lou Reed’s New York album, the evolving Songs For ‘Drella project with John Cale, and the soon-to-be-ever-so-briefly-reunited Velvet Underground.
There’s a lot to discover here. Have fun in the stacks, and if you have a minute, jump on the comments and let us know what you goodies you find!
Ohhhhhhh myyyyyy… Musician was my absolute bible for SO many years. Thank you for this invaluable alert.