The Last Great Rock US Print Magazine
One gets older, and becomes forgetful. That Mission of Burma was an essential band in the Boston hardcore scene. That the Saints managed to create a punk rock scene in Australia from meager beginnings in the backwater that was Brisbane as early as 1973. That D.I.Y. wasn’t just a phase, it was a way of life. That punk wasn’t just a scene in a time and place, but more than 50 years later remains a core tenet of rock scripture.
And sometimes, it’s good to unplug the internet, hold a thick paper magazine in your hands, turn the pages, read about bands one knows nothing about, and continue one’s education. The way to do all of that is to get a copy of The Big Takeover, which just released its 97th issue, which features Substacker Neko Case on its cover. Other cover line stories include: New Model Army. Fruit Bats. Salem 66. The Saints 1973 – 1978. Tortoise. Too Much Joy. (A band I know!). And part two of a rather long Bob Mould interview, which began with Mould on the cover of Issue 96. There are dozens of pages of record reviews, just the idea of which makes my heart leap, though I don’t know much about many of these artists.
Like many readers, I purchase a pre-order when I get the notice that a new issue is ready. I also have purchased it at Barnes and Noble and other magazine-friendly book stores, and from record stores such as Rough Trade and smaller indie or mom-and-pops.
The creator, publisher, editor, main writer (though there are many others), advertising director, product manager, and auteur behind The Big Takeover is Jack Rabid. That’s a pretty good name for a D.I.Y. punk impresario, a former musician (his band was Springhouse) with an economics degree from New York University, and lifelong music obsessive. I’ve been a fan of The Big Takeover for quite a few years, mostly because it is so clearly the work of the founder’s vision, like Harold Ross’ The New Yorker, Paul Williams’ original Crawdaddy.
The original model for this rock-on-paper reflection of one person’s passion was the stapled, mimeographed ‘zine, which began thriving in the punk rock 1970s. That’s how The Big Takeover started in 1980. After graduation from NYU in 1985, Jack put out the magazine, already up to Issue No. 19, while working at New York Life insurance company. “Having reasonable income for the first time meant I could afford to lose more money on my hobby so the page counts began modestly increasing,” Rabid said. “In actual fact I was still in high school in May of 1980, a month shy of graduating when Dave Stein and I came out with issue one, it being his idea and he asked me to help. (The only issue he worked on, it’s only one page and we each wrote half and weaved it together.)” Stein (1962 – 2014) and Rabid worked together on the Summit, New Jersey, high school newspaper in 1979. They co-wrote reviews of Elvis Costello and Buzzcocks albums.
You can see, and even mail order, these back issues, at the website, which has its own distinct content and merch. (When my grandson Ezra was one, I bought him a “Big Takeover” onesie.) But you can’t read Issue No. 97 at The Big Takeover website, which has little overlap with the print mag.
Rabid also does a weekly radio show. “The Big Takeover Show” is on realpunkradio.com, live from noon to about 2:30 every Monday EST. The most recent six months of shows are for free in the archive at bigtakeover.com/radio. So we’re not talking full Luddite here.
Rabid’s signature achievement, aside from keeping the magazine alive, is the long-form interview, the interview in which the interrogator knows so much about the subject that they’ve forgotten about parts of their lives that the person from TBTO seems to have experienced first-hand. There are very few conversations that carry the standard disclaimer, “this interview has been edited for space and clarity.” Some interviews have gone 14,000 or more words, though to be fair, they are usually spaced over two issues. Which, if you have read part one and are in a hurry to get to part two, requires patience. The Big Takeover, as Mr. Rabid and I discussed in some depth last week, is a semi-annual event, (spring/fall) published twice a year. (Google’s AI absurdly asserts that “biannual,” without the hyphen, also means twice a year. It does not. Biannnual, anyway you punctuate it, means every other year. Rolling Stone, back in the day, was published bi-weekly, every other week.) Now RS is monthly.
As I said, Mr. Rabid, who is not rabid but fiercely intelligent, well-informed, and funny, spoke on Zoom from his home office in Brooklyn with my home office in Queens: the video conference tool is still the easiest way to travel between these bordering boroughs. I’ve reconstructed the conversation as a Q&A for cogency. We began, aptly, by talking about those long interviews.
Wayne Robins: When you run interviews, you don’t often use the disclaimer, “this interview has been, cut for space, or, edited for clarity...” I was reading that you did 14,000 words over two hours with Mission of Burma in issues 50 and 51?
Jack Rabid: And they were worth every second of it. The bands that I want to read about the most get the longest features. Often, every single word they spoke. Some other bands, if we had room, you know, for a while, I did have a 250-page magazine, and we did that with, like, 10 interviews an issue. And then we’d have shorter ones to go with it, just because not everybody wants to invest a half an hour into reading an interview, right?
The economics don’t support that anymore. We have a magazine that’s 168 pages, I think, or 172. Instead of 250. So we are obliged to cut down some, actually. Salem 66 was much longer. Bruce Licher and Independent Projects [Licher’s indie label for which Springhouse recorded a CD, “From Now to OK” in 2007; its best known artists include For Against, Savage Republic, and one by Camper Van Beethoven] was much longer. Because I love those people so much, we ended up running the entirety of both on the web. Which is rare for us, we don’t usually do that. But those are really old friends of mine that I made because I love their music so much. And I wanted people to be able to read everything that they said. I wish I’d had full room, like I used to; we would have printed the entire thing.
WR: This would seem to be the philosophy of The Big Takeover that sets it apart from what one sees on whatever newsstands are left.
JR: I think mostly we’re just trying to make a magazine that centers around music that I think is really, really valuable on its face, on its merit. And some of them will definitely be people who just aren’t that well-known, and aren’t used to having a 12-page feature in a magazine. We don’t run like most magazines in that sense. We don’t think, well, what will sell us to advertisers, what will sell us newsstand copies and subscriptions? We try to make the content speak for itself so people will want to continue reading. We’ll buy it just on the basis that this is where music rules. Instead of fashion and economics.
WR: Sometimes you and your writers seem to know more than the artists even remember. Do you run into artists, few of whom are household names beyond their own households, not used to such scrutiny?
JR: You used the word granular, I think, did you? That was thrown at me by none other than Howard Devoto. When the Buzzcocks [co-founded by H.D. and Pete Shelley] came out, finally, officially, with their winked-at bootleg Time’s Up of their original demos from Howard’s tenure in the band in 1976, it occasioned me the ability to...probe him about those days. And so I did, literally, a two-hour interview with him, devoted to the entire period of the Howard Devoto Buzzcocks, which comprised, like, 13 gigs. I think he said 14 if you include a youth club gig for, like, you know, 12-year-old boys. One demo, and one four-song EP, and 13 gigs was the entirety of the band, and we spent two hours talking about them.
Very early on in the interview, he said something like, “will all the questions in this interview…take on such a granular aspect?” Or something like that. But then he, you know, he suffered it. It was, you know, six months of his life. Out of, you know, what, 50-some years he’d been on the planet, but…To me, that’s an absolutely crucial band in a crucial period. Among the few in rock history that are that crucial. If you’re not fascinated by that, then you’re not the sort of music fan that I am, and fair enough, not everyone is. But there’s a lot of us that understand that something really, really important happened.
Still a zine with the slogan, “Music w/Heart/New York/the World…”
WR: This would be kind of before the Big Bang of punk rock?
JR: The Saints interview is a perfect example, because they predated even Buzzcocks. They predated Sex Pistols. Who were the catalyst for Buzzcocks. They predated the Ramones.
Their earliest gigs, playing that material was before even the Ramones first played, and yet they were in bumf*ck, Australia. And out of this comes this backwater comes this band that has no other band to play with. No precedent to lean on. I mean, they were inspired by the MC5 and the Stooges and ’50s American rock and roll, so it’s not like they came out of the ether, like the Velvet Underground. But nevertheless, there was just nothing like it, what they were doing. And, they put out a record in England before the Sex Pistols, and before the Damned, and before Buzzcocks. And kind of kick-started the idea that you could record this new punk rock movement.
WR: I was reading the Bob Mould interview, and he's had a very long career, as a solo artist, and with the band Sugar. I'd almost forgotten that his first acclaim was as part of the influential and much-loved Minneapolis band Hüsker Dü.
JR: You hit the nail on the head. All the stuff that you loved in the ’60s and ’70s. Most of it, not all of it, but most of it are people who aren’t Neil Young or whatever, did their best work in the ’60s and ’70s with their original bands...So you would still maybe listen to their new record or review their new record, but in the back of your head, it was like, boy, that guy was incredible 30 years ago. In the punk generation, this is something we changed, I think. Because the punk generation was not...financially successful, commercially successful in their young days, they were more free not to worry if their solo records were fitting in with the current zeitgeist or their current commercial scene, or the radio, you know?
So they were free to just keep making great records, and not have to worry about whether they’d sell. So we were free to kind of, like, say, like, yeah, he used to be in that band, or this band, or she used to sing for this group, or that group, or whatever, but we were free to continue to…follow them as contemporary artists making really valuable music. Not just, they used to be in that band.
And Bob Mould’s a perfect example of that. He’s made, like, a couple of dozen records since Hüsker Dü broke up. In 1988, I guess it was? 1989? That’s a long time ago. And for years, he didn’t even do any of their songs in his concerts.
WR: You had some mixed feelings about the hardcore scene in New York in the 1980s. I didn't cover it much, but I did enjoy writing about one Sunday all-ages matinee at CBGB featuring the Nihilistics. I think I'm still in their press kit, and I've been friends with (Nihilistics) Ron Rancid on Facebook for years.
JR: They were really good guys, and really…Really unique band. One of the few hardcore bands that was genuinely unique, instead of trying to be like every other band. I think that was really important. Plus, they were hilarious. I remember telling them they should read The Misanthrope by Molière. There’s a precedent for what you guys do.
WR: You told me about being at one of those all-ages shows with other hardcore bands, with a few opening acts that did not go over well with the hardcore crowd.
JR: When they first came in 1983, I DJ’d the show Hüsker Dü did with the Replacements at Great Gildersleeves. And it was, like, hardcore Sunday, so there were about 100 hardcores there. And I think five of us liked the two bands. And were very excited to see them. Me, Jesse Malin, Robert Christgau, of all people. And, like, five other people, and that was it. And the other 95 were standing around with their arms folded, scowling, because neither band dressed as punk rockers. They were wearing, like, flannels and stuff. The reason I remember it so well is because I kept thinking, God, these bands are so smokin’. What a pity their audience stinks. So it was very surprising to me that those two bands ended up, you know, connecting to such a great degree outside the hardcore scene they never really fit with.
WR: Since TBTO is associated with not only punk and post-punk, but a lot of sub-genres like shoegaze...not that I knew much about shoegaze, but I could tell by looking at your magazine that shoegaze was important...
JR: Oh yeah, it’s a wonderful genre. It’s just one of the genres we cover, but…In the early ’90s, for example, it was the most exciting thing happening at that moment in time.
WR: I think people might be surprised about your first and perhaps lasting musical obsession, growing up in the New Jersey suburbs.
JR: I was a massive Beatles fan. I joined their fan club when I was six, in 1968. My mother sent the checks. The only reason I didn’t have all their albums is every time I could scare up $2.99 to go to E.J. Korvettes, which is where we bought our Beatles albums in those days, lacking a record store, there’d be another one there. They were coming up with three albums a year. When I was really little, ’66, ’67, ’68. So I… I couldn’t quite, you know, complete my collection at any given time. Even with Christmas presents and birthday presents, everybody knew what to buy me, it was gonna be a Beatles album.
But when you say you like the Beatles, you say you like about 25 different bands. I mean, they went from…“Please, Please Me” to “I Am the Walrus” in four years. Which is just stunning to think about, that those are…that’s the same four guys. These days, that might be two albums four years. For some bands, it’s one! Nada Surf, they put out an album every four years. So you’d get to “From Me to You” to “Strawberry Fields Forever” in less time than it takes Nada Surf to put out one album.
WR: The Big Takeover covers a wide range of music within a certain tighter range of music. Is that fair?
JR: To really fully answer your question, we don’t really cover any rap. And we don’t really cover any heavy metal, or modern country, modern R&B, for no other reason than that I don’t really like it, and I’m the editor.
If there’s something that comes along that seems to be, like, an outlier in those things, I’ll print it. It’s not a blanket, oh, we’re not covering that. But it has to be somehow fitting into my purview, and obviously my purview is fairly broad, apart from those things. Like, again, there are the exceptions that prove the rule. We have jazz, we have modern jazz. Bits and pieces, you know, they’re not our bread and butter, but…I respect a lot of forms of music when people try to do something that’s purely from the heart.
This article originally appeared in Wayne Robins’ Substack and is used here by permission. Wayne’s Words columnist Wayne Robins writes the Critical Conditions Substack: https://waynerobins.substack.com/.
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