Jann Wenner Relocates Rock ’n’ Roll To A Small Circle of Friends
After Jimmy Buffett died, Maureen Dowd wrote an unusual column about him in the New York Times.
Dowd began by saying that journalists should almost never make the mistake of trying to be or thinking they are friends with artists or other famous people they interview. What she didn’t have to say is that most journalism interviews are transactional. The interviewer gets material that will make an article, feature or column more appealing. The interviewee gets publicity and perhaps enhanced credibility.
That’s fine. The system works. But once in a while, Dowd explained in her Buffett column, the interviewer and interviewee develop a genuine relationship. That had happened with her and Buffett, she said, and she wrote a rather sweet reminiscence of their friendship.
Dowd’s column came back to mind this week when Rolling Stone magazine’s co-founder and long-time boss Jann Wenner was kicked off the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Wenner, a pillar of the Hall since its establishment in 1986, had given an interview (to the Times) in which he was asked why a new book that collects his Rolling Stone interviews, The Masters, includes no women or people of color.
It’s a duckable question. To Wenner’s credit, he tried to answer it honestly. Unfortunately, “honestly” meant saying, among other things, that “Insofar as the women, just none of them were articulate enough on this intellectual level.”
Check, please.
He praised Joni Mitchell as an artist, then added, “Joni was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test.”
He mentioned Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield as artists of color, then rejected them: “I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.”
Could you hurry with that check, please?
At the very least, this provides unwanted ammunition for people who have long felt Rolling Stone has had problems with gender and with black music, and that the Rock Hall has had serious problems with gender.
In a way, though, this just reflects a bigger problem: For almost 70 years, the defining image of rock ’n’ roll has been a white guy with a guitar.
Elvis Presley with a Martin or Gibson across his chest, almost swallowing the microphone, remains a great image. It captures the wild spirit of early rock ’n’ roll. But Elvis was only a part of it. There was Chuck Berry and Little Richard and Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis and Eddie Cochran. There were smooth vocal groups like the Platters and Flamingos and new jack vocal groups like the Teenagers or Del Vikings. There were female vocal groups like the Chantels. There were sax players, rockabilly cats and yes, much as they have been dismissed, swinging pop singers like Connie Francis.
Rolling Stone magazine, founded in 1967, never gave much space to anything before the 1964 British Invasion. And because Rolling Stone was a terrific contemporary magazine, one of the first to deem rock ’n’ roll worthy of serious analysis and serious writing, few readers minded that it was light on history. Or cared that it totally bought into the idea white guys with guitars were rock ’n’ roll’s primary foundation and the most important carriers of its ever-moving torch.
In the world of Rolling Stone, rock ’n’ roll royalty began with Elvis, but really kicked in with the Beatles, the Stones and Bob Dylan, up to Bruce Springsteen, Bono and a handful of others.
Presumably every one of these guys started playing music because he loved what he heard on the radio and wanted to do it himself. Have a great time, get girls. One imagines it was only later, for the handful who endured, that they got into philosophizing. It’s not that it never occurred to them, but then along came Rolling Stone, with an editor who loves storytelling and philosophizing and would give their extended thoughts an ocean of space. Gentlemen, start your rumination.
Rolling Stone had a lot of great interviewers over the years. But when it came to the top artists, a Dylan or Mick Jagger, Wenner often did the interview himself. Since he had rapidly become to music journalism what the Beatles or Stones were to music culture, you couldn’t miss the fact this was a confluence of the elite.
Back to Maureen Dowd’s point, Wenner had not only become pals with his subjects, but moved into their ultra-rarified stratum, the circle that swirls far above the reach or even the vision of mortals. He was the rare media personality who got the all-access pass: retreats on the private island, spins on the yacht, invitations to sit in on the recording sessions, the best secluded tables at the exclusive restaurants.
That’s not a criticism. Like the artists with whom he shared drinks and gossip, Wenner earned it. Rolling Stone was a great idea, and whatever could be said about some of its execution, it did many fine things. It was a prime player, as Wenner hoped, in earning rock ’n’ roll some r-e-s-p-e-c-t.
Wenner’s societal rise did, however, have a side effect: It disqualified him as a traditional journalist.
One of the reasons journalists rarely become pals with their subjects, and shouldn’t, is that journalists work for their readers. They press subjects about things that could be embarrassing, unpleasant or awkward. As Wenner’s magazine often continued to do.
Wenner did not, as he readily admitted to the Times interviewer. His interviews in the book, he explained, are “not meant to be confrontational.. .. They are sympathetic.” He creates a comfort zone, one in which his subjects often have interesting and incisive observations. But it counters fundamental rules of traditional journalism, like when he let subjects edit the interviews themselves before publication. That’s a good way to make a subject happy. It just means readers will be getting a curated story.
An interview with Wenner was a conversation with a trusted buddy, not some reporter who might score clicks by headlining something that maybe you didn’t think through.
That makes it ironic that Wenner himself was tripped up by just such a remark. On further thought, he might — or might not — have seen that his articulation elite looked appallingly exclusionary.
Funny thing is, elitism used to work the other way with rock ’n’ roll. It was the people who didn’t like or understand rock ’n’ roll at all who claimed the cultural high ground, literally or figuratively echoing Frank Sinatra’s description of rock ’n’ roll as “the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear.”
Cities tried to ban it. Disk jockeys smashed it on the air. “You used to get arrested for playing it,” Dylan once remarked.
But while the media image of a rock ’n’ roll fan was the unwashed juvenile delinquent, what flummoxed parents was that most fans were really their own otherwise seemingly normal kids, including millions of teenage girls.
Embrace it those teenagers did, turning even clean-cut kids into outsiders, branded as not old enough or smart enough to know they should snap out of it and start listening to good music again.
In a weird way, Jann Wenner’s Times interview stands that divide on its head. This time rock ’n’ roll occupies the cultural peak, and the top of the top is reserved for the handful of artists — all, by coincidence, white guys with guitars — who not only create the music, but can talk about it at exhaustive length.
As for the rest of us, at least the outsider team this time has Chuck Berry, Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt and Stevie Wonder on it.
