Jann Wenner, who co-founded Rolling Stone magazine and also was a co-founder of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, has been removed from the hall’s board of directors after making disparaging comments toward Black and female musicians. He apologized within hours.
“Jann Wenner has been removed from the Board of Directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the hall said Saturday, a day after Wenner’s comments were published in a New York Times interview.
Wenner created a firestorm doing publicity for his new book “The Masters,” which features interviews with musicians Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Townshend and U2’s Bono — all white and male.
Asked why he didn’t interview women or Black musicians, Wenner responded: “It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni (Mitchell) was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test,” he told the Times.
“Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level,” Wenner said.
Late Saturday, Wenner apologized through his publisher, Little, Brown and Company, saying: “In my interview with The New York Times I made comments that diminished the contributions, genius and impact of Black and women artists and I apologize wholeheartedly for those remarks.”
He added: “I totally understand the inflammatory nature and badly chosen words and deeply apologize and accept the consequences.”
About the above-mentioned context: Wenner, at the time a UC Berkeley student, co-founded Rolling Stone in 1967 to serve notice that rock and roll had come of age, that its high-profile performers of the day, and indeed everything in its orbit, was worthy of serious coverage, that the days of 16 and Tiger Beat had passed. In the first issue, there was a deep dive into the finances of the recently held Monterrey Pop Festival. The piece looked objectively at what did and didn't work about the first rock festival, looking at its organizers as neither exotic types on the edges of mainstream entertainment nor icons of a counterculture that readers were expected to champion without question.
Wenner was mentored by Ralph J. Gleason, jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He quickly learned how to get musicians to discuss their stylistic flourishes and influences. The first wave of record critics he brought on board - Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ben Fong-Torres - may be seen in retrospect as so steeped in the rock milieu as to give short shrift to a broader historical consideration, but they took that milieu seriously. They articulated the inescapable arrival of rock as a cultural force to be reckoned with in a tone that cemented that status.
When Wenner expanded the magazine's editorial scope to include political and cultural stories, he started in with the over-the-top gonzo style of Hunter S. Thompson, which was in keeping with the rock ethos. As time went on, he started running the work of Tom Wolfe and P. J. O' Rourke, who established themselves as independent thinkers who, while thoroughly understanding the countercultural impulse, resisted being in thrall to it. Wolfe and O'Rourke both soon came to gain status as right-leaners at an interesting moment in the history of conservatism. They also wrote for The American Spectator, at the time a freewheeling publication also founded in 1967 in a college town at the forefront of the burgeoning counterculture (Bloomington, Indiana). (TAS has since undergone several morphings of its identity and currently seems uncertain of where its position on the spectrum is.)
In 1977, Rolling Stone published a tenth-anniversary issue, and aired a commemorative television special, It was widely noted at the time that the former exuded the magazine's original spirit, but that the latter was a silly suck-up to the entertainment-industry machine that had established hegemony over what was left of any notion of a counterculture.
Wenner expanded his publishing empire. One late-70s offering was Rolling Stone College Papers, an acknowledgment that RS had become a brand and was indeed geared toward a specific demographic. It was as if Wenner was intentionally catering to the younger siblings of those adolescents to whom Gloria Stavers had targeted 16 twelve or so years earlier.
Another move that indicated dilution of the original impulse was Us, a People magazine knockoff that went all-in on gossipy fawning of celebrities of all types.
Men's Journal was an attempt to flatter the rugged-young-male-adult-seeking-a-defintion-of-masculinity-suited-to-an-age-of-diminishing-demands-for-brute-strength demographic.
Still, throughout it all, Wenner maintained those friendships he talked about in the New York Times interview. And why shouldn't those guys maintain those friendships? There was no longer anything outlaw about any of them. Like any other figure upon whom the populace, with notable fickleness, conferred hoopla, they were mainly famous for being famous.
Wenner, who has been out as gay for decades, cultivated a raucous, bisexual culture within the walls of his magazine empire, according to a new book by Joe Hagan called Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine.
A passage in the book quotes a former employee who said Wenner "fancied himself as a sort of polymorphous-perverse William Randolph Hearst." "'He told me he had slept with everyone who had worked for him,'" said Glenn O’Brien, who joined Rolling Stone in 1973 and quit after what he said were Wenner’s unwanted advances.
One level on which Wenner's heave-ho from the Rock Hall of Fame board is discussion-worthy is the irony of a mainstream popular culture that would still like to see itself as the rebellious foil to a mainstream having to look at what had actually motivated one of its most venerated icons through the years.
But there's an even larger context in which to put this. The counterculture, long germinating and in its peak flowering stage in the 1960s, has been predicated on dismantling Western institutions and norms distilled over centuries. At its core, it's nihilistic.
One could take issue with specific examples of black and women artists Wenner mentions in the NYT interview, and that's no doubt already being done.
For instance, within the context of taking rock seriously, I would imagine Joni Mitchell would have made a most interesting interview for Wenner's collection. By mid-career, she had collaborated with, and cultivated friendships with, a number of serious jazz musicians, including Charles Mingus and Wayne Shorter. She was levels above boilerplate promotional prattle about latest tours and albums.
But consider another context: that of her status as perhaps the supreme embodiment of the feral decadence of the 1970s Laurel Canyon scene.
Consider Wenner's mention of Marvin Gaye, unquestionably in the pantheon of R&B immortals, but also a soul beset by sexual obsession and the attendant personal-life messiness that culminated in his getting shot by his father in a money dispute.
I'd also like to take a look at another angle. Wenner mentions that, of his interviewees, one of his strongest friendships is that with Bruce Springsteen. For my money, that speaks volumes about how Wenner looks at rock and roll generally. As I noted in a Precipice post about Springsteen's Super Bowl Jeep commercial, there's always been a vacuousness about Springsteen that Rolling Stone types were desperate to ignore in their quest to make high art out of rock:
. . . when I look back over the entire arc of his career, including those first two albums, something becomes clear: he’s always been full of himself. In his early days, he was clearly aspiring to be some kind of encapsulation of rock’s development to that point. He’s always been out to make the Great American Rock Album.
So now Wenner comes in for blackballing for not passing muster with the current arbiters of identity assumptions. Just deserts and all that.
And then there's the deliciousness that another quick-to-find-the-correct-side-to-take type will find in seeing the raised-fist crowd eat its own.
But if one steps back for a view of yet wider scope, one can see that it's all destined to crumble in folly. It was hollow from the get-go.
Nobody was ever interested in linking admirability with such traits as nobility, humility, or wisdom gained by adhering to tradition.
So Wenner's disgrace makes perfect sense.
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