Yet another reason for me to feel inadequate: the nicest guy in the music biz, Jack Rabid, is publisher, editor, and main writer for what is probably the best American music mag around, The Big Takeover. If you’ve never read it (and if that is the case, shame on you), TBT comes out twice a year; each issue is about the size of a small-town phone book. OK, so that’s a lot of work right there, right? Not enough for Mr. Rabid – he also plays drums in two or three bands (I’ve lost track of which ones are still going concerns), and now he’s gone and started a record label, Pink Frost/Big Takeover. The first two Pink Frost releases are Salamander by Guided By Voices guitarist Doug Gillard (here’s an mp3), and the new one from one of Jack’s bands, Last Burning Embers.
I feel like such a slug by comparison.
How do I know Jack?* Truth is that I don’t really “know” him. You could maybe call us acquaintances without stretching the word too much. As I think I’ve mentioned here a few times, I used to work for Tower in the 80’s. I held a few different positions during my employment there, but the thing I enjoyed the most was buying zines for distribution to the record and book stores. In the course of that job, I dealt with a lot of different zine publishers. A lot of them were kinda flaky; some were quite, um, difficult to deal with at times. (Usually the difficult guys were based in New York. I’m not making any sweeping generalizations, just mentioning a trend I noticed.) The exception: Jack Rabid, who was always very pleasant to deal with. So I'm glad to see him doing well. I just wish he'd slow down a bit and quit making the rest of us look bad.
*Let me save you some time: “Many people say that I don’t know Jack.” Har har.
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