One of the All Music Guide library’s most valued possessions is a complete set of The Big Takeover, the fanzine published twice a year by New Yorker Jack Rabid. (Yes, that Jack Rabid — the one who has played drums in Even Worse, Springhouse, and Last Burning Embers.) From its Xeroxed one-page beginning to its present state — issue 62 is 224 pages in length, including interviews with Stephen Malkmus, Ray Davies, Josef K’s Paul Haig, and Band of Horses — Rabid and his staff have been covering independent and otherwise non-mainstream rock music since 1980, stuffing each issue with album and concert reviews, reader feedback with lengthy responses, and editorials. Rabid led several of our writers to bands like Savage Republic, the Comsat Angels, For Against, the House of Love, and Ride. Even now, with an endless supply of information at the fingertips, The Big Takeover is as necessary as ever, as vital and reliable a gatekeeping resource for music discovery as any other. (If Rabid would only replace that very old quote on the subscription form…)

The next best thing to flipping through a fresh issue’s Top 40 rundown? Listening to Rabid spin records. (Actually, it might be just a little better.) Each Monday at noon, a new installment of Rabid’s hour-long Big Takeover program becomes available for listening or download on Breakthru Radio. He is limited to playing independent releases, but that isn’t much of a hindrance; this is a man who, almost 20 years ago, devised a list of his top 750 albums released from 1975 through 1989, and his appetite for music since then has not diminished. There is an emphasis on newer releases, but older favorites are also incorporated. A new edition went up just now, with Billy Bragg, British Sea Power, the Sharp Things, the Bags, Wipers, and several others in the mix.