Former Musician writer Matt Resnicoff and Musician Magazine: Classic or Dud?

in the mid-90s, though, they turned into a horrible hybrid of a consumer music magazine and an instrument magazine, running record reviews in which they would casually note what model mixing board that really great sounding hootie and the blowfish album was recorded on, or what gauge bass strings flea was using on that particularly hot solo. they would note this not in a sidebar, but in the middle of the review itself. it made for some really really clunky reading.

ha, I got a couple issues of a magazine dedicated to trucks before my subscription ran out

Flanagan is now on that CBS tv Sunday Morning program on occasion. Unfortunately, he mainly only plugs aging middlebrow safe rockers and r'n'b singers. I had liked some of his Musican mag stuff, but not what he is doing now for the most part.

Definitely. And his one or two word reviews are masterpieces of context.

he's produced a lot of extremely worthwhile music shows for vh1 and related channels, including the "storytellers" series.

Then a year or two later they did an absolutely awful 'heavy metal' special championing people like Leo Kottke.

-- Ned Raggett (ne...), December 8th, 2005.

His review of the GTR album was the greatest review ever. And it was less than one word!

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Musican.htm?s=03

Website archive for Musician Magazine

sweet

hell yeah!

super cool, thanks!

Interesting transformation. In the earliest issue they mostly cover jazz, and there’s a somewhat snarky review of Aja. Then two years later they have Steely Dan on the cover.

nice find!

heck, if enough of you guys like Musician, I might as well dish!

I was an intern at Musician from 1991-1993, I think the only intern the mag ever had, as college students in the NY area interested in the rock press tended to go for RS and Spin, and in any case, I was the only person my age I knew who read it; indeed, from 1988 through to 1993, I bought that thing as soon as I could find it, like I would later for Q or Mojo, or for like X-Men or Teen Titans a decade prior. Unlike RS or Spin, where interns were charged with rigourous or humiliating tasks, I showed up for a few hours on Friday afternoons, and the edit staff had me do specific tasks less than five times over the time period specified above. so for the massively massively overwhelming time as such, I was hanging out with older guys, several whom I admired very much, fucking around (one of the guys on staff is still to this day the funniest guy I have ever known), talking about Richard Thompson and Robert Wyatt and other artists my metal-, punk rock-, hip-hop-oriented peers wouldn't be interested in, hearing awesome anecdotes and gossip, and then going to shows and drinking and smoking pot with them after work was over. I did not learn one goddamn one thing, and while friday at 1pm is probly not the time anything is getting done in lots of workplaces, the NY office was the most do nothing, have a good time all the time workplace I ever encountered.

There were two other guys during that time that were around my age, who were variously employed full time at the mag. One guy got a job at TimeoutNY after a pretty short time at musician, in 1995, and got me to go tp TONY with him; I had been working at Razor & Tie, eventually producing CD reissues, and took the chance to go into music writing/editing, which is what I wanted (which seems like a more doomed enterprise: reissue label or print mag?). The other stuck with the mag til it shuttered and is one of my best friends. Other than that (getting a full time job though a colleague there is certainly the goal, don't get me wrong), the edit staff, again composed of men 15-25 years older than me, were completely uninterested in helping younger people out or trying to appeal to a younger readership. I was asked to write one FOB item about a band no one, including me, thought anything of but which served the mag's short term interest. Chainsaw Kittens represent!

The EIC of Musician during its peak, while he was fond of both of those other guys around my age (he appeared to find me singularly useless), was notable for his utter lack of interest in engaging with younger people, like us three, who could help the mag adjust to the 90s. He was in his mid to late 30s at the time, and his interest ultimately was in cultivating friendships with Elvis C, Mark K, Bruce S, Gordon S., Don H and acting similarly buddy buddy with various Beatles, Stones, Who dudes, and major label bigwigs etc etc… he absolutely slept on the Nirvana/Seattle thing, and his efforts to catch up were ham-handed: he couldn't get Eddie Vedder to talk to him, and he bought some other guys interview raw material so that he could do a writearound like that… why on Earth Vedder, who will trip over his feet to kiss up to older rock dudes, somehow felt like this EIC was too corporate for him to dignify with interview time, when this guy is accepted as a peer by all his favorites, was odd to me…

And so he left in 1993, knowing that the mag was ill equipped to contend with 90s rock, or rather, knowing that he was ill equipped to address it. His replacement was an utterly hapless keyboard mag guy, who got bulldozed by the major label and publishing big shots who he could handle with one hand tied behind his back, and the mag limped along until 1997.

And so, perhaps you or some super fannish buddy of yours always had a secret or not so secret desire to be friends with super major rock people. That kind of ambition seems to be suspect, far too ass-kissy for most contemporary sensibilities. But that EiC achieved that kind of closeness, with those Great Men of Rock, and that is very clearly what is important to him out of his time at the mag. Similarly, the guy whose name is in the title of this thread is close, intimate friends with —no joke— nearly every single living elite rock/fusion guitarist alive, and has recorded music with several. Both of these guys m0re or less have very very little use or interest in anyone who doesn't happen to be in the Great Men of Rock or Greatest Living Elite Guitarists categories of humanity.

Hahaha this alllllll tracks. In both good ways and bad. Would you want to post this anywhere else, v.m., or would you prefer to just have it be here? (I'm not going to share it cold, that would be rude.)

would the EIC have been Bill F?

good dish, vm! i wrote a handful of pieces for musician around the time of your internship, mostly front of book pieces on random back of record company priorities (follow for now, represent!). the best thing about it, by far, was getting to be edited by charles m young, who, if i recall correctly, didn't last long as an officially mastheaded employee. he remains one of my alltime favorite rock and roll writers. RIP.

absolutely no reproduction anywhere else, please!

I've been rereading these issues and I'm astounded at how strong the interlocutor questions are. I'm reading an early '87 interview of fucking Ben Orr by Rob Tannenbaum and it's like a thesis.

Great post, vm. I subscribed to Musician for a few years around that time. I started in 6th or 7th grade, picking it from the list of magazines offered in a school fundraising subscription drive. I never LOVED Musician. So many of the artists covered were middle-aged men with bad hair, who appeared elsewhere in the mag in ads for arcane studio equipment that I couldn't comprehend. Although the ads must have worked to some extent, because I remember my middle school self fantasizing about getting a DAT recorder.

Scrolling through a few of these over the last few days, I've come upon articles that definitely stuck with me over the years. "I remember that specific Primus or Fishbone article." It's been interesting to read through these again and see what artists I grew to love later, but had totally skipped over in 1992, even though they had been delivered right into my house via the USPS.

thanks for the backstory vm! My high school library had a subscription to Musician starting in 1981, and later I sub'ed from '83 to '87 or so? So many flashbacks in this archive. Somewhere in here is the one-pager where Peter Buck tells everyone to listen to The Replacements (and I did!)

Moreso than Rolling Stone, Musician was where I discovered I was inordinately fascinated by musicians talking in depth about music, even the artists I didn't like.

Also, I think it was Musician that had an R.E.M. article which included a conversation with Stipe and Natalie Merchant on the "quiet" tour bus. There was some question from the writer hinting at a relationship, and the description of the look that Stipe and Merchant gave each other made me go "Oh! Stipe's gay! Cool!"

I shared it out on FB a long while back but I highly recommend Gina Arnold's article -- skip to page 90 in the PDF -- from the August 1988 issue about the finances of indie bands, looking at Camper van Beethoven, the Dead Milkmen and Dag Nasty. It's very illuminating and interesting.

very cool post vm thanks

Thank you for sharing that vm, interesting story well told

Adding to the thanks for the inside story. I never subscribed — I was a kid, it was expensive — but skimmed it regularly on the racks (especially JDC’s short takes, which like Christgau’s columns taught me a lot about concision). I bought the one with the Replacements on the cover, and the one with a Pixies profile in which iirc Joey Santiago said, “We’re not good enough musicians to be in this magazine.”

I also bought the one with the first free CD, I don’t know how long they did that for. It was my first exposure to Blues Traveler lol. Anyway, I always respected it, I even liked that it was a bit self-serious.

We're a hundred years overdue for a Considine anthology.