On his desktop, he opened a database of all the live gigs that he has ever attended. There was a time when he would see two hundred a year. He took it seriously. “I’ve never done drugs,” he said. In the nineties, as the pop-music editor at New York Newsday, he cranked out reviews and features. When he was hired, the paper made him take a drug test. “I didn’t know whether I was meant to pass it or fail it,” he said.
A D.I.Y. Fanzine, Fifty Years On
When Ira Robbins was publishing Trouser Press, he got mail from Pete Townshend and Joan Jett (who told him to get lost). Now he’s publishing a compilation.