TOPSPIN

Forty years ago, on March 19, 1985, SPIN debuted — somewhat miraculously, honestly — on American newsstands. It was the 90th music magazine available to bookstore browsers, and that’s not counting the legion of free music papers, and the legions of legions of fanzines. Suffice to say, the market was not starved. The fact that […]

Mar 19, 2025 - 13:14

Forty years ago, on March 19, 1985, SPIN debuted — somewhat miraculously, honestly — on American newsstands. It was the 90th music magazine available to bookstore browsers, and that’s not counting the legion of free music papers, and the legions of legions of fanzines. Suffice to say, the market was not starved.

The fact that it’s still here today is, pleasantly, mind blowing.

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The fact that it ever got out the door in the first place is somewhat mind blowing, in retrospect. I pulled together a fantastic but definitively motley crew of writers to be the editorial staff, all of which seemed to be a fine and refreshing idea until we realized we didn’t have any actual editors, or any idea how to produce the magazine, to take our stack of hand-edited manuscripts and get them into a printed issue.

I kid you not! Sure we were creative — massively! — but had overlooked the technical part. So I asked my best friend, Patti Adcroft, the legendary editor of OMNI, which was produced efficiently, by adults, a floor below our office, to come and tell us what to do next. I figured — and suggested to her — that this would take 15 minutes. Three hours later, even her saintly patience exhausted, she finished, and as she was leaving, turned and said, with not a little disgust I believe, “You’re the Land of the Lost Boys!” To which I replied, “That makes you Wendy!” and the nickname stuck for years (and she continued to help us, me most of all, for years).

So we got the magazine to press! And it came out! And people bought it. Not as many as we originally thought — we thought initially that we had sold our whole print run, but hadn’t — yet enough that it counted as a decent introduction to the very crowded field of periodicals gushing about music and new records and equipment to play them on, and, in our case, some odd cultural phenomena to boot.

*Volume 1, Numero 1. Il primo editoriale*. 1985.

When I used to tell people that we were going to compete with Rolling Stone, the Colossus of the field, they would laugh out loud. Then they would quickly apologize, that they didn’t mean to laugh, which made it worse, because it meant their reaction was reflexively genuine. No-one had ever meaningfully competed with Rolling Stone, in 17 years.

The group that launched SPIN was very, very special. The first person I told about the magazine was my close friend Ed Rasen, who was a war correspondent. He had zero experience working inside a magazine, but announced he would be the Executive Editor and I — not realizing I hadn’t actually asked him to be — thought that was a splendid idea. The next person I invited to join our slowly forming cabal was Glenn O’Brien, a certifiable genius, who wrote the back page for Interview. I loved his writing and figured if he wrote for us we’d be great. He said yes, and suggested Scott Cohen, another beautiful writer, so I hired him too. Scott suggested George DuBose, a photographer, so he was hired as Associate Art Director. At that point I told them, no more bringing all their friends in.

I loved James Truman’s writing in The Face — he was their US correspondent. I called him up, we met, and he decided to throw his lot in with us. He suggested his girlfriend, the insanely talented writer Jessica Berens, so we hired her too!

Rudy Langlais became our Special Projects Editor, and no, none of us understood what that meant either, but he was a star who brought in some of our most famous writers and reporters and stories. I forget exactly how I met Diane Luger, who became our Art Director, or Gregg Weatherby, who I made Managing Editor, through no fault of his own, as he never claimed to have done that before. But, God bless him, he learned how to.

It was the most exciting, fresh and imaginative group I’ve ever had the joy and good fortune to work with. Over the years, some peeled away and others joined the mix, equally brilliant, equally mad. SPIN was blessed from the beginning, and I was the luckiest publisher, time and time again, ever.

Sadly Glenn, Scott, Jessica and Ed aren’t here to read this. But if there is a bar in Heaven, and I sorely hope there is, then I like to imagine them sitting there, raising a glass to our accomplishing 40 years for our scatterbrained, inspired project. And perhaps smiling at the memories.

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