Dinosaur rock: Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner proves what a white boy’s club music still is

Is anybody really surprised that Jann Wenner thinks the only “Masters” of rock’n’roll are pale and male? In an interview published by The New York Times last week, the 77-year-old co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine defended his decision to exclude Black and female artists from his new book of rock star interviews, The Masters.

“It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin,” he declared. “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.”

Wenner went on to say that he regretted not including Black artists but felt they “just didn’t articulate at that level”. They don’t articulate, say, at the level of fawningly featured interviewee Bono? The U2 frontman whose wince-inducingly rhymed thoughts on the war in Ukraine were widely derided as “the worst poem ever written”?

If you want to know who Wenner is, then I recommend Joe Hagan’s forensic 2017 biography, Sticky Fingers. It’s a book that gives credit where it is due to some of the great pop cultural analyses nurtured at Rolling Stone. But it’s also one that calls Wenner out as a greedy, egotistical fanboy, who encouraged his writers – including Hunter S Thompson and Tom Wolfe – to form a chauvinistic boys club. In his defence, he put a black female artist – Tina Turner – on the cover of his second edition. He did also hire the brilliant female photographer, Annie Liebowitz. His first female writer was future The Sopranos scriptwriter, Robin Green.

In her memoir, The Only Girl, Green looks back rather nostalgically on the sex and drugs that defined Rolling Stone’s office culture in the Seventies. She recalls that the writers and photographers were all bed-hopping while off their heads on the cocaine that the addicted Wenner used to pay as bonuses.

The boundaries between journalists and their celebrity subjects became blurry. Even Green had a sexual encounter with an interviewee (one of the Kenny clan) and was fired for failing to turn in her feature on the fortunes of the political dynasty. Although she promised Wenner she’d never write about him and their one-night stand, she does call him a “social climber, star f***er” in her book. Bisexual Wenner cosied up to all rock’s big male stars and you can barely read his own memoir over the relentless clatter of names dropping. Most articles about him feature a photograph of him on a yacht with his pal Mick Jagger (a man so articulate about rock history he had to return the huge advance on his own memoir because he couldn’t remember anything). Of both Wenner and Jagger, Keith Richards once sniped: “They’re both very guarded creatures. You wonder if there’s anything worth guarding.”

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Bitching aside, I think we all know rock’n’roll was a men’s locker room in the Sixties, Seventies and even Eighties. We’re all free to make our own judgements on how various individuals could have resisted the prevailing sexism and racism of the era. But, I’ve got time for those who made mistakes back then and have the guts to own them, moving onwards and upwards with humility. Just look at Bruce Springsteen, one of Wenner’s hallowed “Masters”. I suspect a man as decent as The Boss would be appalled to be singled out as an example of an intellectually superior race or gender. His E Street band depended on the soaring solos of Black saxophonist Clarence Clemons, and he did much to unpick the macho myth of the male rock star in his 2016 autobiography, Born To Run.

In that book, Springsteen seriously addressed the womanising of his youth, owning “a misogyny grown from the fear of all the dangerous, beautiful, strong women in our lives crossed with the carrying of an underlying physical threat, a psychological bullying that is meant to frighten and communicate that the dark thing in you is barely restrained. You use it to intimidate those you love.” Springsteen is frank about the “appalling” way he ended his first marriage and the ways in which he has been saved by his second. Reflecting on the muscle-bound appearance he developed in the 1980s, the singer revealed that, behind the scenes, he was deeply depressed. “Hell,” he confides, “I couldn’t even get a hard-on.”

Wenner says his new interview with Springsteen is the only one in the book that is not as penetrating as the others, because they’re such good friends. I picture The Boss patiently attempting to talk Wenner through basic feminism and the BLM movement as I type. I don’t imagine him getting very far.

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The truth is, music journalism still isn’t as diverse as it should be. Back when I covered music festivals, the meet and greet PRs always offered my boyfriend the press pass while I got the plus one wristband. When Harrods opened an exhibition of rock guitars, I fought for weeks to get just ONE owned by a woman on display. Eventually, they took an instrument from Joan Armatrading, who told me that focus groups for her label assumed Eric Clapton had knocked out the solos she’d played on her records. At my local newsagent this morning I walked past a row of wrinkled white faces on the covers of magazines I assume are being bought by the same demographic. On my desk, I’ve got The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music by former GQ editor Dylan Jones, published in 2012. Just 13 per cent of the entries are about female artists.

Nobody in the know would be surprised by Wenner’s sexist and racist attitudes. We should be more surprised by his punishment: removal from the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame board. The Hall of Fame has a worse diversity problem than Rolling Stone. Of the 949 people inducted into the Rock Hall since 1986, just 80 have been women. That means that 91.6 per cent of the Rock Hall inductees are men and just 8.4 per cent are women. Sixty-nine per cent of inductees are white (with 14 per cent Latinx, 8 per cent Black and 6 per cent Asian). No wonder the kids call it a “Boomer Tomb”.

Wenner has apologised for his comments. He says the interviews featured in his book were meant to “represent an idea of rock’n’roll’s impact on my world; they were not meant to represent the whole of music and its diverse and important originators”. If these are the only artists who’ve made an impact on him, then I guess it’s his, HUGE, loss.