{"id":3852,"date":"2017-12-01T10:08:29","date_gmt":"2017-12-01T18:08:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=3852"},"modified":"2017-12-01T10:13:56","modified_gmt":"2017-12-01T18:13:56","slug":"rolling-stone-music-journalism-and-the-baby-boom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2017\/12\/rolling-stone-music-journalism-and-the-baby-boom.html","title":{"rendered":"Rolling Stone, Music Journalism, and the Baby Boom"},"content":{"rendered":"

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LIKE a lot of people I know, I’ve just finished the biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. Sticky Fingers<\/em> is more than just the story of one man, though it gets close to its subject: It’s a real cultural history of English and American music, of American magazines, of pop culture in general, and a shadow biography of what I call Boomer Triumphalism.<\/p>\n

Wenner, as you may’ve heard, does not come across terribly well in here: He manages to betray or lie to just about every friend of professional associate, and comes across, often, as a manic, social-climbing, coked-up rich boy. Some from the early days of Stone have challenged the emphasis (though not the facts) of the telling, including the formidable rock critic Greil Marcus<\/a>. (The book started out as a friendly project, pitched by Wenner himself, that became less friendly.)<\/p>\n

Others find Wenner so distasteful they have told me they are not interested in the book. That he shifted English pop culture is undeniable. What are it causes and consequences?<\/p>\n

I corresponded with author Joe Hagan about Sticky Fingers <\/em>and the half-century it chronicled.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with Wenner\u2019s achievement. How was our world \u2014 at least, the world of music, media, and pop culture \u2014 changed by him? How big an impact did Wenner exert at shaping the way people in the English-speaking world see their culture?\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Without overstating it too much, I think Jann shaped how people thought about the 1960s, and specifically the rock and roll culture that emanated from that era. His key insight of 1967 was that\u00a0rock was a whole worldview that valued personal freedom and social progress. But he also had a hand in shaping how people viewed rock stars themselves, how they should look\u00a0and behave and present themselves in the media. The cover of Rolling Stone was, for several decades, a kind of stylebook of rock stardom, which involved confession, shock and sexuality, the de facto virtues of youth rebellion. And Rolling Stone gave rock stars credibility as social commentators and critics, something that was unthinkable before Rolling Stone. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I got tired after a while of writing \u201cConflict !\u201d in the margins of your book for all the dodgy ethical\/ journalistic calls Wenner made, most obviously his allowing musicians to edit their own interviews. What were his most serious breaches, and on balance, how substantial a departure from professional journalistic standards do they seem?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the beginning, RS was more like a trade magazine, a booster for the rock world, and less an organ of journalistic grit. Wenner understood that certain elements of the mid-60s teen magazine world were successful, including working hand in glove with the rock stars themselves. Even after RS ramped up its reputation with coverage of Altamont or the Charles Manson murders, Wenner still maintained that boosterism (letting rockers edit their own interviews) because it was good for business. When it comes to the kind of activist journalism he espoused, Wenner\u2019s philosophy was basically that you piss outside your tent, not in it. \u00a0For him, a record review didn\u2019t fall under the protocols of the Columbia Journalism School.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Then there was the New Journalism era, known as much for stretching the old protocols of journalism as it was for serious reportage. Joe Eszterhas admitted to Playboy in the 1990s that he made up dialog in some RS stories and people constantly questioned Hunter S. Thompson\u2019s work, wondering how much of it was made up. Jann Wenner was fundamentally a risk taker and he took risks on writers. Rolling Stone was sued for libel in 1976 for $100 million and ended up paying a fine and publishing a retraction, but that was an anomaly and Wenner learned from it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On whole, I\u2019d say RS\u2019s journalism outweighed its boosterism and occasional backscratching. For Wenner, letting his idols control their own stories (or adding an extra star to a Mick Jagger solo album) was a small thing compared to the serious work he published. Obviously this all fell apart with the UVA rape story, which not only hurt their reputation but exposed the brittleness of the magazine as a whole.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Wenner has spent his life engaged with music, and musicians, but I still wonder: What is this guy\u2019s taste like? He loves the Stones and Dylan, but who doesn\u2019t? And he seems to think Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs and Billy Joel and eventually The Eagles are right there behind them. Does he just like \u2014 as one of his defrocked writers once charged \u2014 whatever sells?\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just whatever sells. Jann always hated KISS, who sold a lot of records, and he never put Steve Miller on the cover of RS, because he personally disliked him. \u00a0Jann liked the Big Three \u2014 Dylan, Beatles, Stones\u2014 and he likes California bands of the kind that defined his own success and his own era. His tastes didn\u2019t evolve much past 1977. He is fundamentally a commercial nostalgist. And he likes bands who seem to be an homage to those same bands, like Lenny Kravitz or Kid Rock (who he genuinely likes). He came around to U2 a few years into their popularity, but he came around hard. (Bono was among those who got to edit his own interview.) Bruce Springsteen is a rather late breaking enthusiasm that he developed after Bruce paid him a visit in Sun Valley, Idaho several years ago. Certainly Jann’s access to Bruce added to the appeal. But let me add: Jann\u2019s tastes, as middle of the road as they were, gave him a good sense of his average reader, who wasn\u2019t a critic but more a mainstream fan. He understood the appeal of the main pantheon of rock stars who roamed the earth for decades.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Often reading your book I tried to find a brilliant decision \u2014a nose for talent, a strategic masterstroke, an unorthodox move that nobody else could have come up with \u2014 but mostly kept looking. And yet the number of magazines and cultural ventures that spun out after a year or a decade are legion, while Wenner kept going. despite the coke and bad decisions and ego overload. Wenner clearly had the right idea at the right time, and rode the wave of an expanding postwar economy and music business, but was he a genius \u2014 as an editor, businessman, politician \u2014 or was he just rich and lucky and born the right year?\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

He was definitely lucky \u2014 he told me that himself when I first asked him about the key to his success \u2014 but his primary talent was a) being an adept social climber who inserted himself wherever the culture action was, which made him a natural bellwether for what was happening, and b) identifying talented people. That\u2019s no small thing. \u00a0As I write in the book, he recognized ambition that rhymed with his own and gave writers and photographers and designers freedom to experiment and pursue their obsessions. When it worked out, it was \"\"<\/a>often a huge deal \u2014 especially in the 1970s. I think this is especially true of Annie Leibovitz. In the end, Wenner became a kind of diplomat for a successful generation of rock stars who became their own industry. He excelled at that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I think that like me you are a Gen Xer who came of age after many of the great \u201860s heroes had either broken up, OD\u2019ed, or become rich\/ boring celebrities, and after the Baby Boom had woven its own youth into eternal myth. To what extent is your book a quintessential Boomer\u2019s story, with Wenner seeking to make his generation\u2019s heroes the Universal Gods, moving from campus protestor to suspenders-wearing plutocrat, ending as a sort of pop-culture version of Donald Trump?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s the story of the last 50 years in America \u2014 the prime years of the boomers, certainly, but the prime years for all of us, whether we liked it or not. Because we have lived in the boomer shadow for a long, long time. \u00a0Their money and influence and self-involvement shaped music, film, politics\u2014even the underground culture that emerged to counter it, whether punk or grunge. Jann\u2019s story defined a lot of that narrative\u2014indeed, I often call him the \u201cid\u201d of the baby boom because his personal story, \u00a0and the story of RS, hews so closely to the generational story. That story is essentially ending right now. \u00a0Jann did not predict that his 50-year anniversary would mark an ending, but here we are.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

After years of working on the book, what seems like a Herculean number of interviews and a very heavy amount of research, how do you view Wenner and his body of work, such as it is? How do you think of him, his magazine, the rock and pop and celebrity establishment he leaves us with?\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

I think of him as a kind of Greek parable of his age. And the establishment that was left us is now being toppled and rebuilt in the image of a more racially plural and fast-moving generation\u2014partly in response to the old generation\u2019s last brittle totem, Donald Trump.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Some charge that the book was a hit job, that you went out to make Wenner and Jane [Wenner] look bad, to emphasize bad connotations and ignore good ones. Have you heard this yourself, and why do you think this notion has spread?\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n

Obviously I strongly disagree that the book is a \u201chit job.\u201d \u00a0It\u2019s unvarnished, sure, but not unfair. I understand that a lot of people\u2019s careers were made by Jann and certainly there are those who share his reverent and nostalgic view of the past, especially at the 50 year mark. I don\u2019t begrudge them their hurt feelings or critical reviews, though I seriously doubt that Greil Marcus read the book beyond the index. I think the book makes a strong case for Jann\u2019s editorial genius and overall legacy. And most independent critics have observed that.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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