Synths, Cassettes and Sade’s Producer: Digging into the ‘Musician’ Magazine Archives

For more than two decades, the US magazine Musician covered a broader range of music and genres than any other publication of the time. While Rolling Stone was focused on Boomer rock and covering Jann Wenner’s favorite acts, and Creem was reveling in punk, hard rock and new wave, Musician was celebrating the artistry of lesser known jazz, folk, rock, reggae, and R&B by artists who, decades later, remain relevant. Musical instrument manufacturers took out full-page ads to market their newest gear. Jazz labels like ECM or artists like Yellowman who didn’t stand a chance of getting covered in bigger magazines bought ads, and included just enough information to grab your attention. Below, the King Yellowman ad notes that it was produced by Bill Laswell’s group Material.

The magazine shuttered in the mid-1990s, so eBay’s been the only way to find copies. That recently changed. The essential archive World Radio History has uploaded the full run of the magazine, and with it a bounty of information and data on a fascinating era in music, when blank cassette companies were industry players, MIDI was infiltrating recording studios, and synth companies were pouring millions into marketing campaigns. Unlike Rolling Stone, Musician spent time with music producers who were innovating in the studio during every session. A 1986 interview with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis that occurred after they’d hit with the Force MDs’ “Tender Love” and Janet Jackson’s “Nasty” concludes with a rundown of the gear that the funk team were using at the time:

“Musical equipment includes a Yamaha C800 acoustic piano, and a raft of elec- tronic keyboards including an Oberheim OB8, Yamaha DX7, Roland JX8P and JX3P, and an old ARP. Rhythm machines are the Linn 9000 and Oberheim DMX, a Roland TR-808, ‘and combinations thereof,’ according to Jimmy. There’s also a Yamaha trap set (Zildjian cymbals). Terry Lewis plays FenderJazz bass, and just bought a Rickenbacker. There’s but two guitars in the place—a Fender Tele- caster and Kramer Focus.”

Tucked inside are brilliant one-off ads. The one for Laurie Anderson’s Home of the Brave film and score consists entirely of white text on a red background.

An interview with Sade producer Robin Millar finds him discussing the unlikely success of Sade’s smooth R&B: “No one can understand how Promise has smooched its way to the top and settled in at number one in the British charts with nobody really making that much noise at all,” he boasted. Later in the story, he talks about hearing Sade’s demos for Diamond Life, and what he brought to the album. “What wasn’t there was percussion of any description, and so I introduced this element as a fundamental part of the group’s music, as I felt that in a loose sense it evoked the right sort of mannerisms for the style of songs that Sade imagined she was writing: 60s and 70s soul-based music,” Millar said. “This was the most definite way of maintaining the track’s momentum in a forward direction without cluttering it up with extra instrumentation. Her voice seemed to need air around it to hear the way she started and ended words.”

The below ad from 1986 is absolutely frame-worthy.

All this said, Musician certainly covered more than its share of dreck — major label write-offs, cheesy blues rock bands, way too many “guitar heroes” — and were well aware of the selling power that came with featuring the most successful and famous artists of the time. The covers were devoted to superstars including Michael Jackson, U2, the Police, Jerry Garcia, and The Who’s Pete Townshend, but tucked in the nooks were forward-thinking features on electronic music and experimental musicians — especially in the 1990s. An interview with Orbital on their sampling gear and production processes is fascinating. A 1996 interview with Gastr del Sol’s Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs features a great O’Rourke quote on guitar playing and rock music.

“What I’m interested in is how you contextualize music,” O’Rourke said. “Rock bands tend to take the gestures of the music for granted, without considering the context. Power chords take on a significance of their own, certain movements onstage convey meanings they may or may not intend, simply because they’ve been so thoroughly exploited they come with a lot of baggage. I wanted the form we used to be a kind of communication, rather than have ideas communicated by context or references. So we exaggerated the form by doing things like writing a one-minute song with a five-minute coda.”

Plus, where else will you find an ad for the launch of a new drum machine that would go on to upend popular music?

You can find the entire Musician archive here.