You know what’s like an opinion and everyone has one. And here at SPIN we’re no different! We have lots of opinions! Chiefly about ourselves, but, whatever.
So, this being the 40th Anniversary of our launch, we woke the SPIN staff up from their afternoon nap and asked them to tell us what their favorite cover was from the last 40 years. A couple of them said “What’s SPIN?”— but we just put that down to their still being a bit sleepy.
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But everyone roused themselves and here you go! Tori Amos, a big favorite with us, almost to the point of her considering a restraining order, is the only musician to have two of their covers chosen.
There’s old school and new school. But mostly old school. No-one knows what any of that means.
Bob Guccione Jr., founder and Acting Editor in Chief
Bob Guccione Jr., Founder and Acting Editor in Chief
This was a first in magazine publishing (American at any rate, not sure about the rest of the world) — four different covers for the same issue, a gimmick since, of course, repeated ad infinitum. Gene Simmons, who I was friendly with, called me and said we should put KISS on the cover. He had a reason. I wasn’t sure it was right for us, Gene assured me I’d be happy if we did, and, as a kind of way to make the idea more palatable, I said the only way we’d do it is if each band member posed for their own cover, and we’d print four covers.
Each was a close up portrait in full, legendary makeup, taken by John Scarisbrick. I was wrong to doubt Gene! It went onto be our best-selling cover ever, in no small part because die-hard KISS fans bought eight copies, four to display and four to put in plastic sleeves and preserve as collectibles.
I love this cover graphically (I didn’t hate the sales either) and I think that, like all iconic magazine covers, back in that golden age when magazine covers really meant something, that it holds up, decades later. It was full of life and color and excitement.
Here’s the 1996 story by RJ Smith. Time capsule, baby…
Charles Moss, Associate Editor
I was 11 when the October 1986 issue of SPIN came out. I didn’t own the issue personally, and while my memories are hazy at this point, I believe my cousin Chad had it. He’s the person who introduced me to what would become one of my favorite bands of all time, R.E.M.
Three years older than me, I looked up to him in many ways, but it was his affection for alternative music and college radio that I admired most. We lived in the same house and shared a bedroom (very long story) and I remember his vast cassette tape collection was, in my eyes, the epitome of cool—Camper Van Beethoven, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Pylon (another legendary Athens, Georgia band), and, of course, R.E.M.
Fables of the Reconstruction had just come out and I remember Chad listening to it on his boombox, with songs like “Life and How to Live It,” “Can’t Get There From Here,” and “Driver 8” blaring from its speakers. What was this band? At that age, Athens and the music that came from there seemed like “half a world away,” but it was only a three-hour drive from where he lived in Tennessee.
That year, thanks to my cousin and this issue of SPIN, I became a devoted R.E.M fan for life.
Danny Klein, Creative Director
Evan von Oehsen, Partnerships Manager
People forget that Bender went on tour with Beck.
Jason Perl, Senior Vice President – Brand Partnerships
Liza Lentini, Executive Editor
Three words: Those. Red. Gloves.
Marybeth De La Cruz, Director of Operations
Matthew Thompson, Senior Editor
Ah, the ‘90s — simpler times. Take 1994, for example. It’s when up to million people were exterminated in 100 days in Rwanda in perhaps history’s fastest genocidal rampage — although the US was kind of distracted by O.J. Simpson and his slow speed car chase that followed the butchering of his wife and her friend (a butchering Simpson couldn’t possibly have done given it was awkward for him to don a glove in court). It’s when Ayrton Senna crashed and died at the San Marino Grand Prix. It’s the year that a punch-drunk post-Soviet Russia withdrew its military from Germany, Latvia, and Estonia, and sent it into the Chechen Republic. It’s the year a quake hammered LA, leaving 57 people dead and towards 9,000 injured. A USAir jetliner went down that grungy annus at Pittsburgh, killing all 132 passengers and crew. Serial killers Fred and Rosemary West were arrested in 1994, their years of depravity finally stopped and exposed. War in the former Yugoslavia raged, with SPIN photographer Francis Tomasic one of the thousands killed that year. Meanwhile, the IRA announced a ceasefire and Ronald Reagan mentioned that he had Alzheimer’s. The Australian government agreed to financially compensate indigenous people displaced decades earlier by the UK detonating seven nuclear bombs on their land. Haiti was in political turmoil. Dozens of members of the Solar Temple cult offed themselves in Switzerland and Canada. Eighty-five people were killed and hundreds injured in the Hezbollah-linked suicide bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.
Oh, and perhaps in an attempt to calm the planet down, thieves nicked Edvard Munch’s pre-meme meme, The Scream, from an Oslo museum.
Good times.
And while God was in one of His let-them-eat-blood phases, who stepped up? Tori Amos, rock and pop goddess, with 1994’s Under The Pink — an album carrying the anthem for a world wracked by savagery and pain, “God,” with its zinger of a line: “God sometimes you just don’t come through.”
And lo, here is she, gracing the October 1994 cover of SPIN, shot by Lauren Haynes resplendent in and of her adorned unadornment, her raw red mystery, her pagan femme divinity.
“Do you need a woman to look after you?” asks Amos in “God.”
No, Tori, I needed you.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.