Record Guide Shootout: Rolling Stone vs. Christgau Consumer Guides vs. Trouser Press vs. Spin Alternative

FYI, the Doors entry in the red guide was written by Altman, and it’s glowing. (Begins: “Brash, courageous, intelligent, adventurous, and exciting. The Doors were all this—and more.”) Four of the albums get 5 stars, and another five get 4 stars.

It was such a dick move, IMO, for Marsh to replace appreciative reviews (by others) of major bands he hated, with self-penned slams in the next volume. Isn’t it better to default to positivity? It’s not like these earlier reviews were poorly written or ill-considered.

I worked w/Altman for a brief time, years ago; I should have asked him what he thought about his Doors review getting deep-sixed between editions.

(Actually now that I think about it, I do remember discussing the RS guide with him in some way, but it’s lost in the mists of time.)

Is Spin Alternative the one with Rollins on the cover?

― Stevolende, Friday, August 23, 2019 2:30 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348450171l/604083.jpg

Are you thinking of this one? I remember getting this out from our local library.

yeah that's the one.

(Marsh is off the hook, thanx to his famed one-liners:)

JOHN VALENTI
* I Won’t Change / RCA (NA)
Pop singer who’d be better off if he did.
— D.M.

Totally forgot about the other sections of the RS Red Guide at the back. The five star album covers juxtaposition with the surrounding reviews become particularly O_o.

Never had the Christgau books, but my copies of the others are pretty dog eared. I found lots of bands and records through them. The Spin book is the nicest one, as it has color pictures through it all. I had the Blue Rolling Stone one first pretty early on and then the Trouser Press book. The Spin book came out a couple years later and my roommate in college had that one, but I later on got one. I also got that illustrated book of Rock too.

The only one of these I had was the RS one that omar little posted. I read it so much my copy fell apart. I've never heard of Christgau except on ILM and what people post makes him seem useless to me. I don't know what Trouser Press is (I mean, I could search for it but it was never a part of my life), nor did I ever see the Spin one.

(Trans-Oceanic) Trouser Press was a fanzine turned magazine named after a Bonzo Dog Band song that started out Prog oriented but got into Punk and New Wave pretty early. The magazine itself died out in the early eighties (although their Friendbook page contains scans of the print issues, not sure if it’s complete yet) but the name lived on through the guidebooks.

in an earlier incarnation the illustrated encyclopedia was the "nme book of rock" (a chunky little block of a book with no illustrations), and totally my bible in the late 70s. its co-compiler, the recently bob woffinden, moved on from rockwriting to actual proper real grown-up investigative journalism, but is still filed in my head as an important knowledgeable elder

i bought and greatly took against RS red in 1979ish (lol marsh u doofus) and so never graduated to blue -- i was quite ideologically hostile to star systems then, and am probably still a lot more in the meltzer than the xgau camp (tho i do now also have all the xgau guides and do sometimes use them; he grinds my gears taste-wise but i enjoy his extreme compactness of style)

i used this a *lot* in the 80s (i also own the trouser press guide to 90s rock but probably only ever cracked it few times):
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41QEWBuYHiL._BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

i actually contributed one entry to the spin guide (cabaret voltaire: jon savage suggested me when he couldn't do it)!

i thought i had the lillian roxon but i can't right now find it, so maybe i meant to get it and forgot. the hardy & laing penguin guide to rock is bulky and uninspired (laing was an important figure in uk rockwriting, who also died last year sadly). i notice i have a rough guide to rock, but i can't recall ever even opening it.

i have all but one of the eight editions of cook & morton -- cook was my editor and mentor at the wire and i bought them up secondhand when he died, as i felt bad that i'd till then only owned the first when he was still alive. there's a LOT of overlap but each one has some stuff unique to it, plus at 1534 pages the final one was (at the time anyway) the biggest single-volume paperback that had ever been published wahey

ugh the "recently bob woffinden" = the "late bob woffinden"

in paul gorman's oral history of music-writing there's a nice little tribute to roxon from meltzer (nice partly bcz so unexpected given its source)

https://www.facebook.com/trouserpressmagazine/photos/a.944647265678093/1006629452813207/?type=3&theater

One thing I loved about the Woffinden book was the illustrated album covers. They weren't large, but they were in color (unlike the RS red book? I think they were black & white in there), and the book led me to buy more than a few albums just because I remembered the cover from Woffinden's book. Two examples off the top of my head: Family's Music in a Doll's House and David Bromberg's Midnight on the Water.

also zigzag put out an "independent labels guide" in 1980, with updates for several years after that: i have the first (i mean i imagine it's still round the flat somewhere tho i can't put my hand on it)

this was an impressively comprehensive listing, of artists and releases and labels, especially of cassette labels. there was no critical engagement but i wasn't after that -- bcz i would be supplying it obv. i liked and embraced the idea that "rock" in the 70s (as a catch-all term for all kinds of stuff that we no longer call rock)* could still be gathered into one book, but soon and excellently there would just be too much to do this, and this was good, and we would all evolve to grasp the complexities of a swirling crackling pluralism (narrator's voice: we did not ect ect).

*in fact we'd already stopped in 1980 and who's this "we" anyway -- but this is how i thought then i think

oh oh *this* was also very useful (again bought in 79-80 i guess, while i was still a student and desperately wanted to become a music-writer):

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91P9288q5XL.jpg

mine is in very much worse condition than this^^^ one lol

RS (Red) covers B&W yes.

Yours,
James "RS" Redd und die Blecchs und Weißes

i think the only copy i ever bought of trouser press had a cover illustration of the pig balloon from PF's animals and a long interview of utopia-era todd rundgren, which did not at that point fulfil my year-zero needs

Badaboom Gramaphone fanzine had an issue "Bands Not in the Trouser Press Record Guide" that was quite well done, and which I geekishly shelved next to my Trouser Press volumes.

the Logan/Woffinden encyclopedia pictured above
How come this doesn't have the word "Harmony" in the title?

Despite inevitable omissions (xpost) the TP guides seemed more comprehensive than the other guides in that they contained loads of entries for acts who weren't commercially successful at all, even by alternative standards

...although these entries may have been pruned back a bit by the time of the 1991 edition, with so much more to cover by then

the Badaboom addendum was affectionate and came in '98, so an update. TP was fantastic, and pretty reliable (though they did rate Rip it Up over You Can't Hide Your Love Forever. supplemented in pre-internet days by George and Martha DeFoe's Volume International Discography of the New Wave and then later by The Great Alternative & Indie Discography.

Volume International Discography of the New Wave

I remember this! It was so packed with data that I found it kind of intimidating (when I was new to the genre)

Forgotten, but this had a bit of influence on me:

http://phildellio.tripod.com/primer.jpg

It came out in 1980, part of the first wave of canon-creating. There are basic album libraries for 11 genres, with a list of 20 singles appended for most of them. Specific acquisition (I downloaded it 25 years later) based on this book: the first Third World War album, the 10th inclusion in the punk section. Thanks, Rock Primer, thanks a lot.

Or, to paraphrase Chuck Eddy, maybe it was the third First World War album, how should I know?

I've spent hundreds of hours with the Rolling Stone Guides and the Christgau. Somewhere along the line, I seemed to misplaced the Trouser Press. And even though I subscribed to Spin for awhile, I'm not sure I even knew they had published a guide.

the rock primer is actually a good example of "the idea that "rock" in the 70s (as a catch-all term for all kinds of stuff that we no longer call rock)* could still be gathered into one book" -- it has chapters (by different writers) headed respectively rock&roll, folk and blues, rhythm & blues, soul, country, british beat, california sun, dylan and after, reggae, punk, the seventies. each has an intro, 20 representive LPs reviewed at roughly a page and then a bunch of singles (in several of the earlier chapters, many if not most the LPs are compilations). "the seventies" hoovers up glam and prog and weather report and elvis costello's first alb (!) -- and i think kraftwerk was one of the singles, but the very final pages have fallen out of my copy so i can't check this. electronic music was NOT well served.

in 1979 nme had put out a partwork called the "nme guide to modern music" -- it was designed by barney bubbles and i think you collected it bit by bit across a months-worth of issues. this mixed krautrock and electronic music, proto-industrial, dub, disco and more in with punk -- the foundation of the space not yet called (and IMO always miscalled) "post-punk". i still have a *very* fragile and tattered copy of this, which was probably more important to me than *any* of the above.

http://www.barneybubbles.com/NMEmodmusiccover.jpg

No Kraftwerk, Mark--they get mentioned a couple of times in the section intros.

Where the '70s singles appendix really misses, I'd say, is 1) in relegating the entirety of disco to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, listed among the '70s albums, and 2) obliviousness of this whole parallel universe of K-Tel and Ronco junk, a small part of which left behind some brilliant singles. Example: "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)." Every one of their 20 singles, with the possible exception of Abba's "SOS" (who in 1980 did not have much critical cachet, at least in North America), is more or less rock-criticky. When Scott Woods and I had to assemble a '70s discography of 100 songs for I Wanna Be Sedated, we made sure to include some of our favourite K-Tel/Ronco songs.

would be interested to know what was listed for krautrock at the time.

In The Rock Primer, nothing. Or at least not in the Punk or '70s sections--maybe they parked their Krautrock picks in the Folk & Blues or California Sun sections. (In the interest of full disclosure, that's a genre I'm only barely acquainted with myself.)

i'll dig the nme guide out and check stevolende (probably tomorrow):

but from memory KW, can, faust, neu! and the plank-adjacent offshoots but not much deeper than that (certainly none of the brain stuff or guru guru or whoever) -- eno's interest in eg moebius and cluster was more of a guarantee of suspicion i suspect than enthusiasm, at least at this particular moment (when ppl still felt he was probably spoiling talking heads)

it may well also not be termed "krautrock" -- which had been the rude term of art in the early 70s and would again be after cope's intervention, but was very likely disdained in 1978, when the point was the refashioning of everything, including the evidently ropey assumption that eg KW, can, faust and neu! were even operating in the same genre (which obviously they weren't, unless you mean *huge catch-all handwave* rock or "modern music" or whatever)

I have a copy of the first NME Book of Rock from 1975 which has entries for Amon Duul II, Can, Tangerine Dream and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and also a section for "German Rock" which mentions Birth Control, Neu, Faust and Kraftwerk. It recommends Neu's debut, Atem, Kraftwerk's debut, Dance of the Lemmings, Wolf City, Ege Bamyesi and Future Days.

the second edition adds a kraftwerk entry but drops stockhausen and the entire section on german rock (so neu and faust vanish)

You have got to be kidding me. It's got to be Trouser Press record guide all the way. The only one that doesn't tell you what to think, and you don't even have to agree with the reviews to get an idea of what something sounds like. It's a great document of the post-punk era.

Write-in vote for the Virgin Encyclopaedia of Indie and New Wave

Busted out RS Blue tonight. The Doors entry Marsh did mentioned upthread, if I’m being honest with myself, is quite good, actually – it acknowledges that the S/T and Morrison Hotel are good even if you don’t like him or the Doors. There’s also an excellent Can entry tho I’m forgetting at the moment who wrote it.

I stand by my assessment of Marsh's Doors entry (and I'm not even a Doors fan) -- it's an extended dis, clearly written more as a public smackdown of the group's enduring popularity than as a sober assessment of their qualities. Marsh should have removed himself from writing up a band toward which he had such antipathy -- but he did the opposite, inserting himself for visibility, rather than seek out a review with a less sneering tone (even if he was insistent on discarding Altman's write-up).

(I feel the same way about the Dead entry, and in that case I am a fan... We all enjoy ripping on stuff we don't like, but I think these guides work best when "major" groups are at least given a charitable shake; otherwise it comes off as petty, like Marsh was just licking his lips at the chance to set these negative opinions in stone on everyone's coffee table. Check out the Kiss entry for comparison -- their records don't get high rankings, but David McGee's write-up at least sounds like he's trying to foreground what's good/interesting about them.)

(and I'm sure some "minor" artists weren't pleased about being dismissed with a one-line gag review; but I haven't heard those records so I'm not in a position to insist on better treatment for them!)

dave marsh is a pretty terrible writer, easily the most dispensable and annoying of all the "classic" critics imo.

I thought the Doors were given a charitable shake: Marsh tried to make the case for them as a potentially solid singles band.

notes as promised on the the nme guide and "krautrock"

— there are full and reasonably friendly entries on kraftwerk and can: KW also feature to push home an anti-prog point in the central essay (by charles shaar murray and angus mackinnon)
— all the obvious kraftwerk jokes are made (lol they are coldly rational robots!)
— there is no separate entry for "german rock" or "krautrock" (there is one for "free music" -- viz evan parker etc -- with the suggestion that this wd be a good field for e,g, cabaret voltaire to look into)
— cluster, neu! and la dusseldorf are mentioned in the ultravox! entry, as is eno: cited as the good side of what ultravox! do badly (their crime: being the "fag-end of glam")
— in eno's own entry none of the german bands are mentioned
— no faust, probably bcz they were no longer one bit active at this time (actually there might be a passing exuberant reference or two in some of the pseudonymous paul morley-penned entries, he was absolutely their vicar on earth for several years)

the whole thing is only 64 pages long and very evidently -- despite its loudly declared futurism -- a mishmash of the current tastes of all the various unnamed contributors, with a summary of the immediate present (akron! pub rock! manchester!) more urgent than a full-on year-zero manifesto (even if this is how i took it at the time). it's good -- if very circumspect -- on the rising homegrown electronic scene

Finally, a poll that makes me feel young.

Lol

la dusseldorf! unsung heroes

voted trouser press bc that was the one i had and read the most (although i probably grazed the others at the library, i didn't own them/have them at my fingertips at home)

I've given away most of my music books. I still read XGau online, he was maybe the most important critic to me and I really liked his reviews, but they often seemed obtuse and infuriating. The RS guide was impressive and I know people who loved it but ultimately it didn't do it for me.

Trouser Press, to be sure. I was given the third edition for my thirteenth birthday, and when I saw a fourth had come out a few months later it was one of those rare weekends when I refrained from buying anything so that I'd have enough money to buy the new book the next weekend. TP was totally foundational in establishing a canon with punk and new wave at the center and everything that preceded or followed as being in that lineage. It introduced the whole punk/DiY ethos to me and was thus largely responsible for me making and recording my own music in the years that followed — it "gave permission" that I didn't know I didn't need.

I also acquired the '92 RS guide and made considerable use of it for the classic rock canon, though the main thing that stands out to me about it now is its unflattering entry on Genesis. The pithy style was frustrating to read after Trouser Press devoting a paragraph or so to each record. Later I tracked down the red and blue books; the latter had the virtue of leading me to the Nonesuch Explorer Series. The Spin book seemed like a lesser Trouser Press when it came out. I found Christgau willfully arbitrary — it was the only one of these books that was sold as the opinions of one guy; the use of letter grades seemed particularly perverse as it didn't seem like anyone would "learn" anything from him except Christgau's schtick. Later I enjoyed the flip voice of the writing, but at the time the vicious grades (which didn't share my TP-approved UK-centrism) seemed like the point.

This points to a virtue of Trouser Press for a kid, which was that its lack of a scoring system required you to spend some time reading the entries to discern their enthusiasm, disdain or ambivalence. A side effect of this was that the symbols they did provide — the bullet to tell you what was on CD, the nr/ to show what was a UK import — gave discographical information "objective," preeminent importance; after evaluations, entries would often conclude with further information about different releases, EPs, compilations, etc. In retrospect, the combination of critique and dutiful cataloguing leant a "we left no evidence unexamined" authority to the proceedings.

This points to a virtue of Trouser Press for a kid, which was that its lack of a scoring system required you to spend some time reading the entries to discern their enthusiasm, disdain or ambivalence

I think this is part of why I voted for Trouser Press. Also, I just feel like, more and more consistently than with the other guides, the reviews tell me about what each album sounds like and what the reviewer gets from the music , in a way that makes me feel like I might be able to get something similar.

Christgau

Spin