In an era where Rolling Stone might as well be People, and where there are very few publications that publish based on instinct, The Big Takeover is the exception. If you have never read the magazine, subscribe now by clicking here or on the cover below.

You'll learn a lot after just one issue. And pick up any CDs in his Top 50. It's a seal of approval if not from him, then by me. In any event, it's my privilege to present Part I of my interview with Jack Rabid of The Big Takeover.

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DF: I really think that your magazine is one of the best in the world. It's really the only US print publication that I think has any credibility at this point.

JR: That's really, really kind of you.

DF: I attribute it to your amazing musical taste. How did you develop it?

JR: Yeah, just one step at a time, it's a very typical, voracious desire when you hear one thing that really turns you on to another. When I was a little kid, I just really got into the Beatles. I've said this before. It's like a little kid getting into Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera or the Backstreet Boys now because they were just that phenomenon of that time. The fact that they were good, like the greatest band in history, as opposed to completely puerile fluff, is very fortunate for me.

DF: So certainly, it was a great jump off point for you to just go in different directions?

JR: Well, I was a pre-teen so I didn't know anything about music. In fact, I first heard them when I was about 3, 4 or 5 years old and I joined the Beatles Fan Club when I was about 6 so I can't really take any credit for it at all. It's just that happy accident that when I was a boy the greatest phenomenon of that time were in fact incredible artists and there hasn't been a time like that since. If I were 6 yrs old now, I'd probably be buying Madonna records or something.

DF: Then we wouldn't have The Big Takeover.

JR: Well, it remains to be seen if someone 6 yrs old now buying Britney Spears records will in fact at the age of 18, 12 yrs from now, begin an underground rock magazine. I can't help but think that listening to Meet the Beatles everyday of my life for like 6 months at the age of 6 or 7, at least in a small way kinda prepared me for you know the Stooges, and the Clash and the Sex Pistols. It really isn't that big a jump, in terms of at least in the guitars, the energy, I think.

DF: I think it is also about the media's need to categorize music and like you said, I don't think that there is a big difference between the Beatles versus the Stooges.

JR: It's the attitude and the desire of what sort of music they [The Stooges] wanted to make. But in terms of the energy, I wouldn't be surprised if they could pop out a copy of Meet the Beatles. They certainly loved the Kinks as much as I do. Having heard of them a fair amount when I was a kid too; again, because they were chart hits. A bizarre thing to remember is that the bands we canonize now were in fact Top 40 groups and that was their aspiration, that was their goal and that was all that was desired. Nowadays, it's almost a bad place to go because if you have a chart hit, chances are you suck. The industry won't allow anything that is good to sell or at least go before the public.

DF: Or at least put the money behind it.

JR: Well, that is part of not allowing it. It's kind of like an old Steinbeck novel or something, whenever you try to do something good, you find the forces are aligned against you to ensure that you can't get it done. I guess a lot of more idealistic politicians find the same thing the moment they start out in their career. Even if they can get to Washington, which makes them one of the few, they get completely thwarted there.

DF: Or you have the conflict of interest. You want to keep your job. There are a lot of people I've met in the mainstream music business that have really good musical taste, but they can't really promote it.

JR: Well, you know, one of the nice things about having The Big Takeover is that I can write about anything I want. Some of the other papers I write for, two-thirds of what I cover, they won't touch. And it's not because they don't like it, it's because they can't sell magazines that way. Or if it's a record store publication, they can't sell records that they don't carry in their record store. That's just the way it works, I'm afraid.

DF: One of the things that I talk about with some of my friends and some of the writers that I know is this constant statement that rock 'n roll has basically died. To me, I think there is a lot of vibrant music happening. Reading The Big Takeover, there's so much going on. What do you think?

JR: Yeah, I've seen that preacher giving those last rites a few times.

JR: I can knock out that statement in a few words—you never heard an eighteen year old say it. It's so easy when you get older to decide that my music is dead. It's a very reflective, lazy, cop-out that usually comes with the so-called wisdom of aging. I don't buy it. In 1977, I heard people say that because they were really into the Doors or something. You know, "there will never be music like that again".

DF: The late '70s is when The Big Takeover started, correct?

JR: Well, no, 1980. But in a way it really started in the late '70s because if I didn't go to those shows almost nightly for 2 or 3 years in big bad ole NYC when it was a scary place, I don't think the magazine would have begun. The magazine kind of just began where something that's frayed eventually gets torn. You can't separate that tear from the fray. It wasn't just a sudden rip one day that just kept fraying and fraying until the tear finally took route. It was so natural to start a magazine. I didn't even think of it, really. It was almost like: should I go to the Diner and have a hamburger, or should I start a fan-zine? It didn't seem like all that big a deal.

DF: It must have been an amazing time: you had The Ramones, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids.

JR: Yeah, I kind of vaguely covered that in the last two issues, in the history of The Big Takeover Parts I and II. Because of the history of the magazine as opposed to the history of music, I more touched on it than really went into it, but I had to go into it to get that sense. What I did was what everyone was doing. There wasn't a sense that I was doing anything great because that was expected of you. That was encouraged completely. Get involved, do something. You get to a club and you meet people and you'd say "oh what are you doing" and they'd say "oh, I'm taking photographs" or "I'm managing this band" or "I'm a poet" or "I'm doing some underground films. You want to see one?." It's like everybody was doing something. Nobody was there going, like "well, you know, I'm not doing anything." They didn't even have any money, but they were doing something.

DF: There weren't a lot of spectators; it was just a lot of people involved?

JR: Well, if you were a spectator, it just means you were planning something to do; you hadn't figured it out yet. I guess you can lump me in that because I was from the suburbs. I didn't have that urban sophistication that the people I was meeting had. I wanted to acquire it in a snooty way like I want to get in on this. I want to be doing these things, if that's what being "urban" is. Because nobody was doing anything in the suburbs. They were raising their families, which is fine. They were playing little league ball which is what I was doing at the time when I discovered punk rock. It surely isn't something "to do".

DF: Emerson, Lake and Palmer?

JR: Well, I never did that. I was spared bad taste because punk rock came along when I was 15 or 16 precisely the time when I would have acquired bad taste. My brothers certainly had very bad taste and were always trying to pass it along to me. I'd listen, I'd go okay, that's cool, but I'd never buy the records.

DF: Well, you had good taste and you knew better.

JR: I don't know, I think I didn't have to, they had the records. I think if I really wanted to listen to Billy Joel I could go into my brother's room. But, I thought it was pretty good song writing, but I didn't care for the music at 14 or 15 that much. I was more interested in my brother Dave's versions, believe it or not, which I think indicates something that I was more interested in, more instant gratification, like immediate. Nobody would think my brother Dave's versions on the piano were better than Billy Joel's, but, to me, they were. Because he was making it right there in front of me, and I could sit down and sing it with him if he was doing an Elton John song I liked back before Elton sucked. So, I guess it wasn't that unusual. But the other thing is, I got very, very lucky that the people in my home town, my good friends, instead of getting into bad music, we all together got into good music and it's helpful to have a little support group right around you.

DF: Kind of learning as you go along.

JR: Yeah, I mean we were like 15 yrs. old and your best friend is turning into a David Bowie freak and you're ready to turn him into the psychiatrist to cure him of his cult behavior. David Bowie of all things! I just remember being really concerned about him. I thought he'd lost his mind. I went over to his house and he was playing me a Bowie record and I go "I don't like this at all" and he goes :"well here, I taped it for you, take it home" and I'd take it home and it was Changes One, the greatest hits record, and I played it, and I didn't like it, and I played it the next day, and I didn't like it, and I kept saying "why do they like this stuff?, this is terrible". But everyday I kept playing it and after a week of this I was like "why am I playing this everyday?" It was overcoming my built in resistence.

DF: It kind of became part of you after a while.

JR: Within a week, I just realized that I was being an idiot; I really love this stuff. It was just a prejudice that kept me from saying it, and that's just loopy. I think it's just like anything else, you hear something everyday for a while, if it has rhythm or merit, eventually it hooks you in.

DF: One of the things about your background is that you really covered the New York punk scene and, in the the last issue, I noticed a small memorial to Joey Ramone. Certainly, he was huge in New York and around the world.

JR: Well, he was huge in some of New Jersey, in the minds of certain 16 year olds. He wasn't huge any where else in New Jersey but in the heads and brains of 16 years old. Jack Rabid, David Stein and Jeff Hutchinson and Janet Whitehouse and two or three other people, he rocked their world.

DF: What contact did you have with Joey personally?

JR: At that point, none. It would have been like talking to Charlton Heston playing Moses. You've got to be kidding? You couldn't talk to Joey Ramone. We first saw them in early '78. We were from the suburbs. We had only been into the city to see baseball games once or twice.

DF: Anyone that I've ever known that ever met Joey just talks about him in really high regard. He apparently was always courteous to everybody.

JR: In a way, I think of him more before I met him. You know, how he existed to me as a recording artist. He meant the world to me. All four of them did. We went very, very straight from David Bowie to Iggy Pop and when we had that Pandora's Box open, holy shit, it was right there, reading about those guys, and everyone saying they were the Godfather of this brand new scene in England and New York. And we're like, let's check out those bands. The Sex Pistols, the Clash and Ramones were the first three we checked out because I guess they had the most available records and the most press and the most advance chit-chat, so-to-speak. So buying a copy of Rocket of Russia, which had just come out, and playing it at a volume that would shake entire houses up the street, I can't describe what that felt like.

JR: When I put "Cretin Hop" in the new issue as part of my tribute, I imagined me just turned 16 jumping all over the damn den playing that record so loud and playing that song so loud thinking, yeah, this is me. This is me completely, this is what I want to do. You know, I can't tell you how weird that is from where I came from. It probably was weird enough if you came from downtown San Francisco or downtown Cleveland or something. But being in the lap of shelter-the-kid suburbia, to me, it was as radical as if Karl Marx himself had come and sat me down and said listen, I've got something to tell you.

DF: It definitely kind of makes a person an outcast. I know, I went through about the same thing. I think we are about the same age.

JR: Good grief, but I never felt that way. We had the three or four of us, so we were outcasts together. But it was fun. To me it was fun. People would sneer at me but I would just laugh. A lot of people's stories about those days were how difficult their lives were being Punks and how they got beaten up and they were outcast and all that. And I never think that. I think, wow, how glorious a time that was, how much fun I was having. It was a badge of honor when people sneered at me. And I'd think, wow, they don't get it. This is just proof positive that what I am doing is right. Because, you know, instead of being concerned about me they were telling me what a loser I am. I think about that all the time now when I hear "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "Pump it Up" by Elvis Costello and all these other punk rock songs at sport arenas these days. You know how it's like the approved party music. You put that song on at any party in 1978 or 1979 and everybody would leave the room, beat you up and make you put on another record like the Best of the Doobie Brothers, which by the way, was the party approved record of 1978.

DF: Exactly, "Long Train Runnin'".

JR: I could not stand that album. It was the scourge of my junior and senior years.

DF: That and Gino Vinelli.

JR: I didn't hate that anywhere near as much as when The Wall came out. You couldn't get rid of that. The Wall wasn't as bad as the Doobie Brothers. I wanted to smash every single copy that existed in the United States...

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In Part Two of our interview to be published in the October issue, Jack shares with us a list of some of his favorite records, his interviewing style and philosophy, his editorial philosophy, his opinions about print media in the U.S., interviewing Joe Strummer, the Bad Brains and getting to know and play with The Buzzcocks.

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