Bob Guccione Jr.
It is a trick of the light to see the times of one’s importance as an important time. So I remember 1985, when I started SPIN, as pivotal, as a historic border between an era of relative innocence melting into shapeless dusk and a rising dawn lighting a hard landscape of cynicism and avarice. That is both true and untrue. The country had just re-upped Ronald Reagan as president, once again buying his snake-oil vision of America as a curative for all that ailed us. It was a time of bland plenty and artistic stagnation, and also of crippling need and artistic promise. The Cold War was raging and dying.
Into this dropped SPIN, like a little naked, pink baby, not by any grand design but by happenstance. One day I thought it would be a great idea to produce a magazine that did for its generation what Rolling Stone had done so well for baby boomers a little older than me a generation earlier. I imagined a magazine that would cover the music and artists that I was listening to, and report on serious issues in a way that the readership would trust because it would be undistorted by the corporate agendas of mainstream media. I got the inspiration from a Cyndi Lauper song. That probably says more about 1985 than anything.
In 1985, Foreigner topped the charts (with, to be honest, the hauntingly beautiful “I Want to Know What Love Is”). Rap blossomed in the Bronx and occasionally spat its flames in a few small clubs around New York City, although more commonly in the boroughs, while Springsteen played arenas and stadiums and maybe even airports, I don’t remember, and seemed to own a time-share of the cover of Rolling Stone, along with other safe entertainers like Billy Joel, Hall & Oates, Santana, and Paul McCartney, a man who made milquetoast look edgy. There were two musical nations, but this was not yet an even-sided civil war.
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At the time, there was a radio station on Long Island with a weak signal, called WLIR, which played new music, the kind you couldn’t hear anywhere else on the dial, but which was all my friends and I were listening to—relying on records and tapes we found and told each other about, a handful of clubs, and those restaurants hip enough to play it. Reception was tough in Manhattan and only possible to get in my apartment at night. When I left the city, I would drive up the east side of Manhattan rather than the much closer west side, in order to pick up the signal. This is where we heard, like magic seepage from an alternate universe, the Smiths, R.E.M., Nick Cave, the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, the Cult, Tears for Fears, and U2, before any of them had a hit.
That music was vital. It spoke to us. It didn’t comfort us in elevators. And it was created by people more or less our age, pretending, like us, that they knew more than they did, were more confident and not as lost as they were. They whispered in our ears through our Walkman cassette players and wailed at us in our homes on our turntables—CDs were just starting to appear but were rare. Occasionally some of these artists gate-crashed MTV, itself revolutionary and thinly available.
If it was difficult to find places to hear this music, it was virtually impossible to read about it. There were treasured imports such as Melody Maker and The New Musical Express (known more commonly, and I never knew whether the irony was intended, as NME). These were English. As was The Face, a brilliant pop-culture and fashion magazine that, from 3,000 miles away, told us about hip-hop being created less than ten miles from where I lived. We were sucking at a distant teat for the milk of information about who and what was shaping our lives.
