Pre-1975 Music Mags: Creem vs Rolling Stone vs Spin(?), FITE!

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I noticed how there was a big fooforaw in the Sounds vs NME vs Melody Maker thread, but I noticed that everyone started their timelines in 1975:

75-77 nme, 78 sounds, 79-82 nme, 83-83 smash hits, 85-87 mm, 88-94 the wire (heh), 95-99 [no vote cast], 2000-date ft

So who was best from [Beginning of Time] to 1975?

― Lord Custos 2.0 beta, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Maybe I should add some wrinkles: Best US mag AND Best UK mag for these pre-1975 time periods?

― Lord Custos 2.0 beta, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

And when, for you did the Old Guard: Rolling Stone, Creem and Spin lose their relevance?

― Lord Custos 2.0 beta, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

spin was def. not around pre-75. debuted like '83-ish w/ virgin-era madonna on the cover.

― fritz, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I think Spin started around 1985. CREEM really helped shape my formative years; it was cool beyond belief, and I still have a stack stashed away somewhere. This was like 80--82. They made a comeback in maybe the early 90s? It just wasn't the same.

― Sean, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

battle of the music mag threads = proof of Nietzsche's eternal return

― Josh, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

spin was def. not around pre-75. debuted like '83-ish w/ virgin-era madonna on the cover.
I suspected as much. Thats why the thread title has "(?)" right after Spins name.

― Lord Custos 2.0 beta, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

yeah - I thought the "?" meant you were asking so I answered to the best of my recollection. I didn't mean to sound snarky.

― fritz, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Its cool...its cool. I have no greivance here. Its my fault for not doing my research.

― Lord Custos 2.0 beta, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Fritz is correct about Madonna on the cover, definately.

― Sean, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

there *were* no uk music mags in the modern sense before 1975 lord custos: mm was probably the closest, nme was a trade pop mag (cross between billboard and loot), and the"undergrounds" (viz IT, ink, frendz and Oz, which all had rock reivews in a la Rolling Stone) => in 1974 then-ed of nme andy gray drafted in some counterculture journos (nick kent, charles shaar murray, mick farren) to pep up the rock coverage

― mark s, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Spin started reasonably strong, even if it was on the backs of writers who had made their name elsewhere (Legs McNeil, Byron Coley, Meltzer did a great piece slagging Springsteen - unheard of and incredibly refreshing for a mainstream publication in the '80s). It was the type of magazine that would give Nick Cave the cover; now it's the type of magazine that would give Creed the cover. Spin got swept up in the alt-rock "revolution", stopped paying attention to indie acts, and was left clueless and untethered when alt-rock died and it had to figure out what to write about now. This is why the only cover stories with any type of editorial enthusiasm are those asinine faux-MoJo "50 Greatest" lists, the frequent appearance of which is an unspoken acknowledgement on Spin's part that nothing much is happening right now. It's still much more readable than Rolling Stone.

― J Blount, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I've seen a few old issues of Creem, most post-Bangs when it mutated into a poor man's Circus, but still, most of them have been both better and worse than I expected. I'd really like to find an old issue of Fusion or New York Rocker or the Voice during one of it's glory days.

― J Blount, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Mark S, Re: there *were* no uk music mags in the modern sense before 1975.

What year did ZigZag start? late 60s? this was a uk music magazine?

[I have browsed through old copies of ZigZag from 78 to the early 80s in the British Library about 3 years ago - seemed an interesting magazine - supporting punk, post-punk, goth, industrial etc.]

Was ZigZag an important magazine after the punk explosion in the 77?

― DJ Martian, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

Martian - thee oldest copy of "ZigZag" I have (BTW if yer reading this robin c I found 'em if U still want 'em. Mail me yr address offlist) has an advert in the back for a management company, "Clearwater Productions", among their roster of bands in this ad is "Group X", who released their first album, and changed their name to Hawkwind in 1969. ZigZag was a bit sketchy abt numbering & dating their early issues, so I've no idea which issue this is, but it was going in 1969. I really like ZigZag, and I think, although it reads like something from ancient history now, that it was the best pre-75 musick mag. I think it was important during punk time, but nearly all my issues are earlier - the latest one I have covers a late '70's Keef Richards drug trial - a good article IIRC written by toe-knee-par-sunz.

― Norman Phay, Friday, 3 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

CREEM was great. in the late '70s when stuff like that started being important to me tho, i never bought it 'cause it always had ted nugent or kiss on the cover, i bought the NME instead. i got into creem later in the 80s when i started reading old copies (& realizing that ted nugent & kiss were actually pretty good).

rolling stone : sucked then, sucks still.

― duane, Saturday, 4 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

The thing is that Spin could get back in touch with "the indies" very quickly as the interweb seems to talk about little else - I assume it's current direction is editorially mandated, i.e. they are keen to talk about music people are actually going out and buying. For a publication which started with Madonna on the cover this does not seem like a "decline".

Spin seems to me easily the best of the US rock music mags which is saying very little I know - but certainly if I was American I'd be buying it. The quality of the writing might well be poor but no worse than at Q surely let alone Rolling Stone.

― Tom, Saturday, 4 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

martian we've had this conversation before: for some reason i always forget zigzag is older than it is: i think it started in 1974, then norman says NO!! In the mid-70s it mainly covered country rock and had the first Pete Frame Rock Family Trees. It was important during punk for inventing GOTH!! (This is true: Mick Mercer was dep ed).

― mark s, Saturday, 4 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

When did Sounds start? Not wishing to make yet another 'I live on another planet to Mark' comment, but I certainly recall reading my older sisters copy in the very early 70s - it was better than the NME because the middle pages were a pull out colour poster. I remember one of him with the flying V in Wishbone Ash. Though it wasn't out and out underground - this was a time when Elton and Rod were serious artists (ie 16 year olds who looked down on the Osmonds liked them) - it was a recognisable 'music press'.

hang on I'll check.

I just called my sister to confirm my recollection and she says she got Sounds for a year or so before switching to the NME because of the Alice Cooper flexidisc 1974ish (hmm, fondness for freebies with music papers must run in our family). I said that I recalled that Sounds was much better pre '76 on UK music as the NME had a US West Coast Rock fixation and kept filling the paper with Little Feet, Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the like. She says she can't remember but doesn't recall them and agrued reasonably that none of these bands were actually West Coast. I said, well.. 'west coast' in the sense of a genre and she said that she doesn't think 'west coast' is a genre and then I said...

And you all thought I was just like this on the internet.

Where was I. Oh Zig Zag was pretty important to me anyway both pre- punk, punk and post punk. It only had a proper (newsagents) type distribution around 81 or 82. However it was available in record stores, I got the one with Gaye Advert on the cover and Throbbing Gristle inside and read and re-read it for months.

― Alexander Blair, Saturday, 4 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

the first rock paper i ever bought was august 77 (nme, wayne kramer on the cover), so my dates before then may be shakier than i think they are: if i change 1975 to 1974 upthread that covers it, i guess, though i really did think sounds started in 1975 => i was v.v. tiresome as a punky teen and just decided to assume EVERYTHING pre-punk was rubbish (to be honest i think i retain some of my pre-77 "facts" from a snobby article i read on the Rock Press in c.1978 in IMPETUS, which was a kind of awful precursor to RecRec mag and/or Wire [actually it covered interesting stuff, it was just badly written and up itself]; it occurs to me a bit late in the day that just because They Thought They Were Marxists — eg the writers of this piece — doesn't mean they had got their basic facts right... )

i sometimes had to walk two or three miles from school/work to find copies of zigzag in shrewsbury: there were two shops that occasionally stocked it =-> the 70s was a different planet, and you young uns *mumble mumble*

― mark s, Saturday, 4 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I remember seeing Zizag on the shelves of my newsagent circa 1978 (along w/ an American mag (?) called Dark Star (?) which covered some of the same country-rock-folk-psych bands - the Dead most obv.) This was in Sidcup btw, so maybe the South East London punk coverage that Dr. C refers to actually worked!

― Andrew L, Saturday, 4 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

ok i have THREE TIMES tried to link to some of the several old threads abt these topics — which feature much off-planet nonsense from me for alexander to wave his arms at — and every time my WITHERED BRANE has done something stupid, so i am going for a walk in the fresh air to buy a coffee and the papers but sadly not zigzags (haha did you see what i did there)

― mark s, Saturday, 4 May 2002 00:00 (twenty-three years ago)

fourteen years pass...

If you remember Robot A. Hull, excellent interview with him at the podcast spin-off from rockcritics.com.

https://andyoucandancetoit.wordpress.com/2016/06/06/interview-wrobert-hull-creem-time-life-etc/

Yea Captain Beefheart, nay Christgau.

― clemenza, Tuesday, 7 June 2016 05:48 (nine years ago)

BOMP!

― Elvis Telecom, Tuesday, 7 June 2016 06:42 (nine years ago)

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