About The Big Takeover

The Big Takeover Twenty-Five Years On: A Silver Anniversary Interview

by Nancy Elgin

(Note: This is an edited version. For the full version of this BT #57 article, subscribe!)

Few things in this life last 25 years; only 33% of marriages reach their 25th year, and 87 to 97% of jobs with a single employer are vacated by baby boomers in less than 15 years. Rarer still in these shortsighted times is the epic endeavor undertaken for the love of it, for the challenge to oneself or even rarer the betterment of society. That’s why the fact that this magazine that you’re reading, and the man whose epic endeavor it has been and continues to be, are deserving of our congratulations on this, the 25th anniversary of The Big Takeover.

If you’ve been a regular reader, you know that in 1980, Jack Rabid and Dave Stein slapped together a fanzine covering one of their favorite bands, The Stimulators, and, by pumping dimes into their public library’s photocopier, began publishing what’s become one of the oldest independently produced music magazines in the history of underground punk, pop, and rock music. A detailed history has been told before (see BT #38, the 15th anniversary issue), but a few things bear repeating. One is that until 1983, BT was given away free at New York-area clubs and record stores, and profit has never been a motive in its publication. Another, related fact is that it has always been produced with the most generous of intentions, the wish to contribute to a subculture and its art simply for the love of it. And third, for 25 years, it has presented the world mostly through the widely ranging eyes of Jack Rabid. It’s been a pretty fine view. Essentially, BT is the vehicle for Jack’s labor of love.

On the surface, that labor of love might look like music, but in reality, it is the desire to share knowledge, goodwill, experience that lies beneath it. At its heart, BT is a forum for sharing, Jack says, almost like a book club. And sharing is central to Jack’s conception of culture as a whole.

“Encouraging culture as a participatory event rather than a passive event is the message that I always try to impart,” he says, “and I think it’s often lost. You have to put yourself out there. You have to do more than just show up, sit in a chair, listen to the music, and go home. The purpose of criticism is to live a fuller life. It all comes back to being participatory. I use experience to teach others about the world, and to have them teach me.”

In the early days of the New York punk scene, as Jack tells it, the spirit of participation and the wish to contribute were commonplace among scene members. Interaction between band and audience was the norm, and most people were musicians, writers, or artists of some sort. Over the years, Jack has participated in the scene as a musician as well as a writer, and that experience helps him to appreciate the effort bands put into making records. That, he says, gives him an advantage over other music magazines whose staff may not be musicians.

“Because the CDs are being sent to a fellow musician,” he says, “they’re getting a little more respect than they might from someone else. I know what it’s like to pour your heart and soul into a record.”

Although that respect extends to each of the approximately 2,000 unsolicited CDs that BT receives for review in each issue, it’s recently become impossible for Jack to listen to every one of them a fact that he calls “a great regret.” He selects particular ones based on what he likes.

“If I’m going to stay in this business, I have to have time to listen to the stuff that I like,” he says. “I can’t be kept from listening to the stuff that I like out of some sense of requirement. And I can’t ignore and punish people because I’ve written about them before.”

To ferret out the gems, then, he tries to look over everything that comes in and read the bios, which often provide clues to bands’ influences and supporters. “I teach my interns and assistant to look for particular information in bios, like ‘produced by,’ ‘guest musicians,’ ‘has played with,’ and ‘has been compared to,’” he says. When you publish 1,200 reviews every year, he says, you have to filter.”

The recommendations of friends and writers for other music magazines also figure into this formula. “I’ve found some of my favorite bands because a friend recommended them,” he says. Some of those whose recommendations he solicits are among the stable of 25 writers whose reviews also appear in BT. And although Jack gets first dibs on the CDs arriving for each issue, he says he often passes on to other reviewers CDs by bands that he knows they particularly like or are knowledgeable about. The remaining CDs are dutifully listed, along with pertinent biographical details, by Jack’s interns and offered to the other writers for review.

Stop and think about that for a minute: 2,000 records. That’s one hell of a long list. And think, too, about the fact that Jack reviews at least 100 records in each issue. “We have a junk culture. I feel like we settle for much less than we should, and that’s to our cultural detriment. You can’t be passive and experience things, and you can’t experience as much if you settle for less. You have to go out there and get it.”

Still, the rigors of running a small business on a shoestring budget have sometimes proved almost too much even for one so dedicated to the cause. “In 1995,” he says, due to a number of life events, including the dissolution of his poised-for-success band, Springhouse, “I made up my mind to be a history teacher. There was no longer any impediment to me not getting a real job. I said to myself, ‘This rock ‘n’ roll’s been a nice thing, but now it’s time to do something else.’”

Luckily for us, 1995 was also the year that the World Wide Web exploded, and Jack was able to forestall the move to the workaday world by writing biweekly editorials for an online site, JamTV. “It seems so naive now,” he says, “but in 1995, people were actually paying good money for people to write for the Internet. There was a lot of funny money out there.” At $750 a pop, writing 26 editorials earned Jack enough of a nest egg that he was able to continue publishing BT. In fact, he says, he poured that money into the magazine and “a writer’s life.”

The Internet also held other advantages for BT. Suddenly, Jack was able to reach far more potential advertisers in far less time by sending a common email to all of them instead of calling each individually. As a result, within a year or two, he says, his ad base doubled, permitting him to double the magazine’s page count. Readership also doubled during that time due to computer users’ ability to find information about BT online. After 15 years of publication, BT went from merely breaking even to being able to support Jack’s modest lifestyle.

Of course, publications have to retain subscribers and sell enough single copies in stores for advertisers to continue buying space, and Jack says that subscriptions have increased fairly steadily over the years, and never decreased. BT currently has more than 4,500 subscribers, each of whom received, until about five years ago, a handwritten letter from Jack upon initially subscribing. Now, he says, he no longer can afford the time that takes and merely appends a personal note to a form letter. Still, that’s a personal touch that you don’t get from other magazines, and it’s indicative of what makes Jack and BT special: The heart and soul are there for the seeing.

On one occasion, Jack even personally delivered an entire set of BT to a new subscriber: the New York Public Library. “I dropped them off in person,” he says. “They were surprised. They said they don’t usually have people dropping off anything in person. I told them I’d never had my magazine purchased by a giant New York library before.” They’ve subscribed ever since, in a testament to BT’s cultural relevance and influence.

Although he doesn’t foresee any immediate changes to the print edition of BT, the revamping of bigtakeover.com illustrates Jack’s desire to best his previous efforts. “Behind doing the magazine has always been the impetus to continually challenge myself in trying to do the business better and to make a better magazine so people will enjoy it more.

“It’s more interesting to me when people do things out of pure love and pure inspiration, not only myself but the people I’m covering, too. I feel like a nonprofit, in a way, because I’m providing something that doesn’t exist,” he says, in other, larger music magazines that concentrate on bands that sell big rather than those whose artistic output merits praise. That’s why, he says by way of example, he gave Visqueen nearly seven pages in BT #56 when no commercial magazine would dare devote so much space to a band with their relatively modest sales.

Simply put, Jack covers bands he loves, and he wants to share his enthusiasm with readers. “I’ve tried never to forget the 16-year-old that I was, when everything was too much too fast and I tried to sort through all of that information. It was all a blizzard of words on a page. It was a great time, but it’s a great time now for someone who’s 16, surfing the net, trying to find the stuff that means something to them. Hopefully, BT can be a part of that for them.

“We’re all going to die, and we have this time between now and then. And since I don’t sit around thinking about dying, I think more about experiencing and living. I want to be able to look back and say, ‘I’m sorry I’m dead. There was more that I wanted to do or say or experience, there were people I wanted to spend more time with.’”

And undoubtedly, more issues of BT that he wanted to publish. When Jack turned 40, he told his wife Mary, “If I have 40 more years to live, that’s 80 more issues of The Big Takeover that I can publish!

“That’s 80 more issues of life I can live,” Jack adds with a grin, focused, as always, on the living. 25 years on, he’s going strong.