Not long ago, I received from a relative a gift subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. As it happens, I had a) been a dutiful reader of Rolling Stone as a kid throughout much of the 1990s; and b) basically forgotten it existed, finding myself a bit surprised to discover it was still a going concern. In many ways, it isn’t. The glossy, oversize publication replete with features, countless ads, complimentary minidiscs, and more that I recalled from three decades ago has shrunk to an industry standard 8×11 format.
More dramatic than the visual style, however, was the change in tone and substance, such that I had the queer feeling of reading a magazine from an alternate timeline—or perhaps something akin to those Rick and Morty episodes where they watch television programming from other dimensions. Above all, it was no longer the child of its founder and longtime publisher, Jann Wenner. Now, as it also happens, I recently read Joe Hagan’s authorized-then-deauthorized biography of Wenner, appropriately titled Sticky Fingers. This served the useful function of preventing me from indulging in unwarranted nostalgia or idealization for what the magazine had once been. Indeed, it effectively demystifies an entire era of rock culture.
The book is replete with a telenovela’s worth of sensationalism—all the sex (both genders) drugs, backstabbing, betrayals, etc. that anyone could want. But the most telling revelation was that the remarkably young Wenner had never been much of a music fan, despite his decision to launch the broadsheet that would morph into a magazine. But what he lacked in musical knowledge and interest, he made up for with that distinctly American entrepreneurial sixth sense. A Berkeley grad coming up in the 1967 Summer of Love, he recognized the moment as it was happening and moved to capitalize on it—and that word is used advisedly, thought it would take some time for real money to come.
What Jann Wenner lacked in musical knowledge and interest, he made up for with that distinctly American entrepreneurial sixth sense.
In Wenner’s own callow words, from the inaugural issue: Rolling Stone “is not just about the music, but about the things and attitudes that music embraces”. In retrospect, those “things and attitudes” were a patina of revolutionary politics overlaid atop the promise of sexual and other forms of inebriation, itself overlaid atop the burgeoning celebrity culture—the appreciation and promotion of which would ultimately prove to be Wenner’s and his magazine’s greatest legacy.
One of the amusing running subplots of Hagan’s book concerns the politics of managing the magazine’s relationship with the band that shared its name (it was never quite clear in the early years whether the band had grounds for a lawsuit, as technically both parties could claim to have derived the name from the Muddy Waters song). In the event, Wenner granted the band no fewer than 23(!) cover appearances; allowing Mick Jagger ample opportunity to limn his band’s legacy in the pages of the magazine (which once devoted an entire issue to Wenner’s interview of him) long after it had ceased to be musically relevant; while Wenner himself penned a 5-star review of Jagger’s otherwise forgettable solo album, Goddess in the Doorway (which Mick’s own bandmate Keith Richards memorably insisted on calling “dogshit in the doorway”).
Wenner himself penned a 5-star review of Jagger’s otherwise forgettable solo album, Goddess in the Doorway (which Mick’s own bandmate Keith Richards memorably insisted on calling “dogshit in the doorway”).
In any case, it was its interest in celebrity pop culture more than any deep knowledge or judgment concerning music that most distinguished the magazine, even in its early days. What Rolling Stone really popularized was not serious musical evaluation but the idea of it. If one were to construct a history of rock music solely out of contemporary impressions from Rolling Stone, one would come away with the following insights: Steve Miller was a more impressive guitarist than Jimi Hendrix; Jefferson Airplane were the greatest of all pop music acts; Joni Mitchell was a groupie of the Laurel Canyon set rather than its greatest exponent, and so on. In the words of the lead singer of the fictional band Stillwater from Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous, this was the magazine that “trashed ‘Layla’, broke up Cream, ripped every album Led Zeppelin ever made”. (A recurring dynamic would be the belated canonization of artists the magazine had disparaged or ignored in their primes.)
Though Stillwater ultimately makes the magazine’s cover, the list of major, influential artists that never would is a long one. It would at least include the Ramones, Grandmaster Flash, Aretha Franklin, the Velvet Underground, Parliament/Funkadelic, the Kinks, Al Green, Public Enemy, and virtually all of the defining postpunk bands, like New Order, The Smiths, and The Cure. Johnny Cash had to die to get there. James Brown—one of the four or five truly architectonic figures in popular music—didn’t make it until 1989.
Even artists that did make it tended to lag the zeitgeist. Run-D.M.C. only hit the cover in 1986 (the first rap artists do to so); the Talking Heads were featured seven years after Remain in Light; Radiohead four years after the release of OK Computer; and The Strokes for their sophomore album two years after the landmark Is This It. None of this is exactly discreditable, but it hardly suggests a publication with its finger on the pulse of music. More broadly, Rolling Stone was a reliable participant in what we might call posthumous vindication. Coming to it late, I could learn about Big Star, Television, Nick Drake, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Love, Shuggie Otis, and many more, but I would not have met them in Rolling Stone’s pages during their primes.
Meanwhile, outside of rock, Rolling Stone’s coverage was virtually nonexistent. Rocksteady and reggae (aside from Bob Marley), British folk, American country, the galaxy of post-bossa Brazilian music genres, Krautrock, jazz, Afrobeat (and forget mbaqanga, mbalax, soukous, etc.)—all these and more passed the magazine by for decades. This all serves as a reminder that it remained a fundamentally mainstream publication, anchored by its fixation on celebrity rather than musical innovation.
Rocksteady and reggae (aside from Bob Marley), British folk, American country, the galaxy of post-bossa Brazilian music genres, Krautrock, jazz, Afrobeat (and forget mbaqanga, mbalax, soukous, etc.)—all these and more passed the magazine by for decades.
And while I’m really not a fan of quota-counting where aesthetic matters are concerned, I think in this instance it’s probably unavoidable: the magazine had a fixed blind spot where black artists were concerned. One could call this racist or just odd, but the truth is simpler: though the practice was inexcusable for a music periodical, it made perfect sense for a celebrity periodical. Hence the reason why Prince and Michael Jackson (four covers each) were prominently featured throughout the 1980s—a decade they commercially ruled—but Stevie Wonder had but a single cover in the 1970s, despite his imperial run of albums at that time.
Thus, we should resist the urge to look back and say, “what happened?” The answer is: nothing happened. The great generational lie wasn’t selling out but believing there had been something to sell out. And yet in spite of itself, Rolling Stone’s legacy is not wholly invalidated. One can mock how celebrating the music quickly became a matter of celebrating oneself; how Rolling Stone glorified an entire generation’s status as consumers and spectators (while concealing that this was what they really were). One can note how faulty and unreliable its critical apparatus proved to be. One can certainly note how Wenner’s own sybaritic excesses that never quite jeopardized the acquisition of wealth made him such an exemplar of all that is detestable in the Boomer generation.Yet the prime of Rolling Stone really did coincide with a period of extraordinary musical efflorescence, even if the magazine’s subsequent history tended more toward the worship of ashes than the preservation of fire. The copies of the magazine that today arrive at my house are reliably directed to a stand in the guest bathroom. But to paraphrase The Big Lebowski’s paraphrase of Ecclesiastes: the music abides.
