Jann Wenner not happy with new "tawdry" biography

He deserves it. It was awesome seeing Rush fans boo the crap out of him in 2013, considering his hatred for them is why Rolling Stone either ignored or trashed them for decades, and then he only let them in his silly Hall of Fame because he basically had to, since most critics in last 10 years have finally realized how stupid they always looked for trashing Rush.

 

You assume that Wenner kept Rush from the HOF all on his own. I think that's a broad assumption...

 

No offense, but I think that Steve needs to get back on his f---- meds f---- quickly.

 

I am sure it wasn't all on his own, but I think it goes without saying that his influence is a major deciding factor in these things. It would take some digging to find them, but Wenner had numerous quotes over the years that showed how little regard he had for Rush.

 

It's not surprising that somebody who is pretty much universally acknowledged as a terrible human being has an issue with his biography.

 

Bollocks. That's not even how the nomination process works in the first place. See this npr piece from a couple years ago:

"The knock on Wenner is that his personal biases, focused on a set of Boomer-friendly acts of the '60s and '70s, dominate the agenda for the Nominating Committee. There are also accusations of slippery vote-counting, which even if true don't seem to have inflicted long-term harm on the Hall (in 2007, putting Grandmaster Flash in the Hall before the Dave Clark Five on a deadline technicality was a little shady — but nominating the Hall's first hip-hop act was compelling, and anyway Clark got in the next year). Certainly, many of the committee members share Wenner's perspective on the history of rock and roll; if you think Wenner has definitive ideas about what qualifies as great music, consider the musings of "Little" Steven Van Zandt, a beloved committee member of long standing. Anyway, for all Wenner's obvious influence, the evidence just doesn't suggest he is a one-man nominating force. Acts he has personally championed remain uninducted and even unnominated. And younger committee members have talked openly about how they compelled members of Wenner's generation to take another look at the likes of Kiss — a band with whom there is no love lost with Wenner. Looking just at this year's shortlisters, it's hard to imagine Wenner personally anointing or advocating the likes of master technician Stevie Ray Vaughan, disco-era soul group The Spinners, and especially Gen-X gods The Smiths. The Nominating Committee is a gatekeeper, yes. The members have their biases, yes. Jann Wenner's aren't the only ones."

The Right Way To Complain About The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame

 

A terrible human being?

 

!!!

 

A terrible human being.

 

Not even close.

 

I still have a subscription because it gets delivered to my house for 75 cents or a buck an issue or something.

Despite what many people have stated here there is almost always at least one article worth reading in every issue, whether it's music related or about the environment, etc.

I don't personally care if they throw a cover and non critical article about someone I have no interest in ala Kim Kardashian. I just skip the article and chalk it up to marketing, trying to draw in people not looking for a cover story and current news about , say ... Jethro Tull. It's not 1971 any more.Time marches on.

And, as you mention , it was before your time , but back in the dark ages of the late 60's and beyond Rolling Stone was my vital link to all things rock and roll .

Good lord, long before the White Album was released I read a short interview with Paul McCartney where he mentioned the band was recording and it might end up a single , double or TRIPLE album. That kind of geek information was priceless to me.

5o years after the White Album was released that might not seem like a big deal now, but the thought of the Fabs releasing a double or triple album was mindbendingly awesome to chew on back then and Walter Cronkite wasn't going to mention it on the CBS news.

 

But there are many acts in the Rock Hall that Wenner didn't like - and plenty he did that never made it.

Of course Wenner has an influence, but I think his influence is overstated. He's the "public face" of the Rock Hall, so he gets the "blame"...

 

Certain people are hot buttons for some members here.

If Jann could just record something with Mike Love, the negative energy here could power New York City for a week if it could be harnessed .

Man, that would create the thread to end all threads.

 

Throw in Yoko and the world would end!

 

But it's not just the public or people here that think Wenner has that power. People in the business apparently think so too.

from an interview with the book's author:

McCartney also was hurt that he was asked to induct John Lennon into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but then wasn't inducted himself until two years later, despite what he thought was a promise that he'd get the nod the following year. Do you think that it was deliberate or an oversight?

Jann’s argument is that he really doesn’t have control over it -- and that if Paul thought that he had made that deal, it was a misunderstanding on Paul’s part. I didn't do an investigative report there. I'll leave that to another reporter who wants to resolve that for all time.

To me the real takeaway is that everybody believes Jann has his thumb on the scale when it comes to who gets into the Hall of Fame. And that Jann doesn't go out of his way to disabuse people of that. The biggest red flag, I suppose, is that many people campaign to Jann for their artist to get into the Hall of Fame, because they believe that if Jann would like that artist to be in the Hall of Fame, it will happen.

'He De-Friended Me on Instagram': Joe Hagan Discusses Controversial Bio of 'Rolling Stone' Co-Founder Jann Wenner

 

So who was this..Lennon and wife, David Cassidy?

 

Rolling Stone was white hot with its finger on the zeitgeist of culture from the late '60s through about the mid '70s. Wenner didn't do that single-handedly, but he was smart/lucky/shrewd enough to hire a large number of really good (and sometimes outstanding and sometimes truly great) writers during that period, and he largely gave them the freedom to blossom free from the shackels of most any other media outlet with as much prominence. It is Rolling Stone of this era that really forms the bedrock of Wenner's contributions to media, and you can't take that away from him. He may be a d**k, he may be a sycophant, he may be a user, and he may be manipulative, and his last appreciable contributions to culture may be long in the rear view mirror. But so what? He still fathered something really substantial.

 

Why?

 

(I hear... that he doesn't like Rush!)

 

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/oct/22/rolling-stone-founder-falls-out-with-biographer-over-candid-life-story

Another article about the book from The Guardian today. One of the points it makes is that Lennon got so angry about Wenner publishing the Lennon Remembers book because John had come to expect that Wenner would do whatever John told him to do. So when John had said he didn't want the interview published as a book, he assumed Wenner wouldn't do it.

Very incestuous relationship between the music journalists and the artists in that period, I guess.

 

Wenner had his head so far up Lennon's posterior it went beyond blurred lines. It even impacted album reviews against those Lennon didn't like, most commonly, McCartney.

 

Noticed this one today:

http://nypost.com/2017/10/22/how-rolling-stone-staffers-lived-sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll/

 

The courage to criticize/'be negative' about things many of their readers presumably liked was one of the best things about the magazine early on; they started their long downhill slide (from v. good but by no means perfect) when there was a mass exodus to Creem, i.e. very early.

 

I am getting more interested in reading the book, just to relive the past a bit.

 

For what it's worth, the library I work in ordered 10 copies, the've arrived and are being cataloged, barcoded, etc. and there are currently 13 holds - so there's demand there, but not like new fiction gets.