Wenner strikes again!

John - I admit I haven't heard the album and have a certain affection for anything Stones-derivative (assuming Peter Wolf hasn't gone electroclash on us); that said I really doubt this album is twice as good as Nevermind.

mind I do think the review is dreadfully written, I just sort of flinch when I feel like questions of "pertinence" are being exhumed for their strike-a-pose value

biz vent: Jagger was Wenner's partner in the short-lived Rolling Stone UK magazine (or whatever the title was). it went under, needless to say, but it's hardly a coincidence that RS continues to cover RS tours like they're God's word or something.

Oh, and didn't Wenner produce a Scaggs record, too?

(this was actually a respond to the Andy K post, but applies equally here)

http://gawker.com/jann-wenners-kid-is-the-new-head-of-rollingstone-com-508921163

It would be interesting if Wenner's kid were to attempt to give any less than a five-star review to some classic artist's new release. The immovable object and the irresistible force and all that.

Be funny if he worshipped all the offspring of Dad's heroes. Julian Lennon remembers. Jakob Dylan: The Rolling Stone Interview

The new John Fogerty album is getting 5 stars according to a publicist email I received

barf

Grade inflation I'm sure, but I will say that I saw him do "Someday Soon" on TV last night--assuming that's not on the album--and it was fantastic.

Ohhhhhhhh boy

Marchese interviews him and does he ever hang himself on his own rope. (Gift link, go nuts.)

It's being discussed in the worst music writing ever thread (even though it's an interview). Everyone correctly thinks he is terrible and stupid.

Great wisdom.

What a dork.

If only the Black prodigies of the music I claim to love were as “””””articulate””””” as mick jagger but alas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYDhjuq08Fg

OK but the boat pic though

was mick fucking for good reviews? or was that just a byproduct of a beautiful affair?

every time I see him talk I think no wonder we elected tony blair

I actually thought it was pronounced Jahn-dek at first, probably because of Wenner and I guess it sounds like the artier pronunciation

the spin screed is hilarious, basically a column length version of pee wee herman saying “i think we should let him gooo”

Greil Marcus responds: https://greilmarcus.substack.com/p/ask-greil-september-29-2023

Shockingly predictable I suppose

Looks like he quoted the Lester Bangs piece that gets rewritten by a different music journalist at least once a decade at the end of his comments

I’m not sure if “racism is institutional, and if we wanted to remain an institution and sell magazines we’d have to toe the line” is doing quite what he intended. But given the book buying demographic, I could see Wenner completely uncynically thinking he’d do numbers by publishing the same old shit that can sit by the checkout lanes to be a runaway impulse buy by boomers who recognize Rolling Stone and his name. Thinking he has a legacy that’s set in stone and you might as well throw one more book out to polish the marble

I flipped through the book yesterday at the store. No new interviews! Instead I saw the "Jagger Speaks!" or whatever issue-length interview granted in 1995, a Dylan one from 2007, and uh I put it down.

a professor emeritus doesn't question what they built their career upon I guess. It's just the typical arrogance of someone who is railing against cancel culture, and even when acknowledging the poor wording, could not possibly imagine it comes from a place of ill intent, just a tepid suggestion it's the racism we all share.

In the same column, he also goes hard at Bernie Sanders for damaging the democratic brand.

So, I'm about halfway through Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner by Joe Hagan.

It's extremely well researched and fairly well written, definitely digs deep and there are so many crazy anecdotes involved the RS crew as well as a ton of the biggest rockers and celebs.

but goddamn, like reading Trouble Boys I ended up getting frustrated with them (like just act right fellas) but jeeezus this guy, I just fucking HATE him 10 times more than I did before when I didn't know as much about him. What a total piece of shit...like even let's say as Wenner contends that it's a hatchet job, if half of this is true he'd still be one of the biggest assholes who ever lived.

just wrapped up the 70s, I don't know how much more time I can spend with this guy, very dispiriting.

lol Greil Marcus despises this book and Hagan.

Griel doesn't always come off the best so I could see that (though he's still far far far above the bar behavior-wise in terms of the RS boys club, I didn't know Joe Esterhaz was from RS for example)

I had the unpleasant experience of Hagan joining a FB thread last week after Marcus had excoriated him.

I screened Where The Buffalo Roam on Prime last week. Bruno Kirby played the Wenner character, a quite good bit of casting.

Re: Eszterhas

He’s very proud of the fact that he was an incredibly dishonest, shady journalist. He parlayed his BS into a hugely lucrative career, just like director Todd Phillips, who made a fabricated documentary for HBO on a fraternity and parlayed that into a successful feature career

Self-XP

https://uploads-ssl.webflow.com/62bf51eb53f5f66021e924c0/62cec39ffd5e3019b99c39be_Kirby.jpg

I kind of feel like Verhoeven knew exactly what he was doing by using scripts by Eszterhas

the only unedited thing by him I’ve read is that “Mel Gibson is a bad man” self-published thing and it’s ridiculously bad and self-serving

Hollywood Animal is fun, but Eszterhas makes some unbelievably stupid points in it

I DO think he has written great films. It’s amazing how BETRAYED (1988) predicted the internet being a tool for neo-Nazism’s growth, and Telling Lies in America (1997) is great

Betrayed was excellent.

He’s very proud of the fact that he was an incredibly dishonest, shady journalist

yeah they touched on that, he had some very "amazing" journalistic pieces that were maybe too amazing it turns out

a real sexist pig to no surprise, but it was pretty bad across the board

ben fong torres came off a lot nastier than i would have thought

ok i’m reading the library preview of sticky fingers because i need to renew my card

it seems to be giving me 99 pages, should hold me until I can check with the library tomorrow

You do feel for him as a child, his mom was a real cold person

Alfred - what are Marcus's problems with the book? Did Hagan make stuff up or is it the framing?

I mean Hagan clearly dislikes the guy that's a fair thing to call out.

he talks about it here

https://www.villagevoice.com/greil-marcuss-real-life-rock-top-10-all-punches/

That Hagan names as inspirations The Lives of John Lennon, Albert Goldman’s attempt to destroy John Lennon, and Positively 4th Street, David Hadju’s attempt to discredit Bob Dylan, means that his book is one more proof that a biography grounded in its author’s contemptuous distaste for his or her subject is not a good idea. There’s a huge amount of information here, but if what Hagan did with what I told him is remotely typical then it can’t be trusted.

He may have named Goldman as an "inspiration," but the book, as those of you have read it know, is far -- very far -- from sensationalistic and grotesque.

I also started reading the Hagan bk after Wenner's recent disgrace. Hagan isn't really a rockwrite guy is he, I guess for good/bad; he writes loads of corny, clunky sentences like this one:

Wenner approached the handsome guitar player in blue corduroy pants and velvet shirt to ask the name of the group. 'The Grateful Dead,' Bob Weir told him. Jerry Garcia later said it was their first show.

No Richard Meltzer in the index; I think it's this indifference to the storied history of American rock music criticism beyond Rolling Stone, before and after, that also (possibly understandably) irks Marcus.

wait, what's clunky about it?

From the first fifty or so pages I've read, I think that excerpt is part of a pattern that exaggerates descriptions of the men in bands to lean on the "Wenner likes hot rock guys" undercurrent. I don't think it's clunky! If anything, there's not a lot going on stylistically and the descriptive phrases and structure feel like by the book writing class material.

Again, Marcus bemoaning cancel culture and dismissing the reaction to what JW said as an overreaction is just coming from a place of thoroughly insulated privilege, from someone who's never had to feel the type of sting and pain caused by those statements. He's more concerned with circling the wagons.

I feel that a lot of people still think a critical reappraisal of privilege and social dynamics means someone's trying to throw their life's work in the dustbin of history. No one criticism is going to do that. It might shift the current view, but the long march of time is what gets us all in the end.

Hey I'm the last person who would ever defend Jann Wenner or Rolling Stone; my history with the magazine is ancient, dead and buried. But I agree with Greil Marcus about Joe Hagan. Sticky Fingers is vile. Here's an excerpt from a rambling blog post I wrote about the book awhile back.

Credited by his peers as a dogged reporter, Hagan digs and delivers a thorough portrait. Yet every step of the way, from Wenner’s privileged and unhappy childhood to his forging of Rolling Stone in the late 60s San Francisco crucible to his relentless pursuit of pleasure and social prominence in the 70s and beyond, Hagan accentuates the negative. Of course, Jann Wenner is own worst enemy much of the time, then and now. He wastes money, mistreats employees and business partners (including John Lennon), maintains an abject relationship with Mick Jagger that resembles Trump’s humiliating bond with Vladimir Putin, and of course inhales enough cocaine to numb the minds of an entire generation. Even the positive and innovative accomplishments of Rolling Stone in various periods get cast by Hagan as flukes or unacknowledged failures. Since I consider Hunter Thompson to be wildly overrated I can’t argue with his sad depiction. But to cite another example: Rolling Stone‘s widely regarded coverage of Altamont, a deeply reported package on the tragic 1969 concert and its era-ending aftermath, strikes Hagan as merely the latest missive in an personal tiff between the Stones lead singer and Jann Wenner.

Much is made in Sticky Fingers of Wenner’s sexual identity, including by Jann himself. Living as a gay man now, after many years or marriage and three adult children, Wenner readily admits to being tortured by his attraction to men during the closeted 1960s. He’s forthright about his inner feelings but Hagan’s breathless, cynical retelling of Jann’s many bisexual exploits during the following decades keeps it superficial. The tone is more censorious than voyeuristic — almost puritanical. At times this biography felt like reading an account of the 1970s written by one of my Catholic high school teachers. See these people you look up to so much, Mr. Coleman, these rock stars and writers? All they do is take drugs and have promiscuous sex and (whisper) some of them are homosexual…

I felt the same, to a lesser extent, about Blake Gopnik's Andy Warhol bio. When a biographer feels contempt for their subject, it seeps into the pages and distorts the life history. Hagan can't see the forest for the trees (pardon the cliche). For all his reporting skills he doesn't have a clue about what it was like to be alive in the Seventies. Well he might have been a child then but you know what I mean.

Robert Draper's Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History is more even-handed and far from adulatory.

Marcus bemoaning cancel culture and dismissing the reaction to what JW said as an overreaction

this is not how I read his Letter in the Ether response linked above.

Huh. I didn't sense the contempt for Warhol; from what I remember Gopnik's good about contexualizing the work and why it was and remains relevant. ymmv.

probably not so much largely bemoaning it but bemoaning the cancellation of JW. noting the egregiousness of his words while suggesting it was a bit cherry-picked as far as the coverage goes, and i mean it really goes remind me of Al Campanis, who was certainly a teammate to Jackie Robinson, iirc supported him coming to the Dodgers, and yet said some horrible things that led to his justifiable dismissal.

https://africa.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/26707588/how-dodgers-great-jackie-robinson-disgraced-exec-al-campanis-changed-game

On April 6, 1987, Dodgers executive Al Campanis appeared on a Nightline program commemorating the 40th anniversary of Robinson's debut and told a national television audience that the reason baseball did not have any black managers, general managers or owners in the game at the time was that "they may not have some of the necessities." Campanis, who had been the Dodgers' GM for close to two decades, resigned two days later, but now the secret was out, for he had officially revealed what black people passed over for jobs had already known: Front offices did not believe they were qualified and had no intention of hiring minority managers.

Even though their eyes should have told them everything they needed to know, it was easy for baseball executives at the time -- as it was for mainstream whites during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s -- to act as if society were moving at an organic, appropriate speed in terms of minority hiring. But Campanis gave voice to a conspiracy, a deliberate institutional thinking that, once voiced, couldn't be massaged or spun or explained away.

Marcus is trying a bit to massage, spin, explain away. Now would JW consider himself racist or misogynist, vote for right-wingers, use slurs in private? No, never, and I really doubt it. Is he an outright *bigot* per se? Not in the sense we usually imagine. But the institutional issues are there.

But the idea that Rolling Stone itself is as such a racist and sexist publication, is to my mind a fraudulent notion, advanced to make other people look good.

Greil must have missed the "hot ready and legal" Lindsay Lohan cover and accompanying article.

Ultimately the comments will stand by themselves, too egregious to apologize for.

is not an effort to explain away.

Perhaps it should be said he's considering them an awkward misstep that is out of character rather than inadvertently revealing something. I think he might be blind to the latter being true because the former is what seems true on the surface. he seems to refuse to consider that as a possibility.

Seems kind of lame for me to argue about something Greil Marcus said while the world is going to shit of course

+1

i mean honestly read the book but policing the ethics of rock criticism is not really a big deal to me at all (though wenner clearly put his hands on the scales often and has admitted as much despite what marcus says)

there's just a lot of specific things he did and ways in which he treated people that just seem beyond the pale to me, like he lacks fundamental empathy to people who aren't jann wenner. so unless marcus is saying those things aren't true and didn't happen, (or like I said even half of them not being true wouldn't be enough for me) - i don't care how the author spun things or whatever precious missing "context" there was, he's a shit human being.

I think they'd imagine that they kept pace with, or were ahead of, the times and that means the racism and sexism were excusable. Which isn't the point of criticisms of systemic bias and prejudice -- it's about effecting change, not doling out punishment. Although it's hard to see the difference when you were in the in-group

Well if nothing else this thread convinced me to check out Betrayed.

THANK YOU, JANN WENNER!

I’m just happy to inspire someone to watch a Costa-Gavras film

It was a Costa-Gavras film I never got around to seeing - in my queue now

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/exclusive-women-staffers-of-jann

Marisa Kabas talks to twelve women who were RS staffers under Jann

supposedly the first sales numbers on the Wenner interviews book indicated 800 copies were sold

I wonder what the overlap is for people who bought Hackney Diamonds on CD

Wenner should have put out 30 different MLB team cover variants.

xp all of them, the book was a bonus giveaway for the first 800 CD's sold.

Whatever happened to Tom Berenger?

UHELSZKI: What I noticed back in the day with why (Wenner) didn’t put women in Rolling Stone is women in the Seventies and the late Sixties were just encouraged to be pretty. No woman was expected to give her opinions. You were a groupie; if you’re an artist, the attention was on that quaint little term “your old man.” And no one took you seriously. When I started writing in the early Seventies, when you went into an interview or got on a tour, (A) nobody thought you were the writer, and (B) nobody was happy to see you, because the prevailing notion was “What’s a woman know about rock & roll?”

My first road tour was with Steve Miller and I thought he made a pass at me, and then he told me, “That was just a test. How could you actually sleep with the subject of your story, and then the next day shove a microphone in his face?” It was a wakeup call. There was no way I was ever going to have a liaison with one of the people I was writing a story on. [Being hit on] happened all the time. Rick Wakeman answered the door in a towel, and he wouldn’t get dressed.

I have a friend who calls it “embrace the suck” — when something untoward happens, I just use it as part of the story. Every little slight became fodder. Like when Jimmy Page wouldn’t speak to me except through an interpreter when I was on the Led Zeppelin tour — I think it was ’77. He said, “You have to tell my publicist the question, she’ll relay them to me, and she’ll tell you.” It was like a translation, even though we all spoke English. And I made that a story. (Editor’s note: A rep for Miller said he wasn’t available for comment; reps for Wakeman and Page didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/women-rock-critics-music-journalism-misogyny-change-1234853829/

You Love To See It:

https://pitchfork.com/news/bernie-taupin-takes-dig-at-jann-wenner-at-rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame-2023-induction/

“I guess you could say my being inducted is a paradox, perhaps, but either way, I’m honored to be in the class of 2023 alongside a group of such profoundly ‘articulate’ women and outstanding ‘articulate’ Black artists along with all of the other music masters here tonight,” Taupin said. Wenner had said that the female artists he encountered during his time at Rolling Stone were not “articulate enough” to include in the book and gave examples of Black artists who “didn’t articulate at that level.”