Last night, the Times announced that Jann Wenner, the co-founder and publisher of Rolling Stone—which is about to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary—was putting his remaining fifty-one-per-cent stake in the magazine up for sale. For years, Wenner has been gently ceding control of the company and its assets to his twenty-seven-year-old son, Gus, who is now the chief operating officer and president of Wenner Media. “It’s the end of an era,” Gus told the Times, “but it’s the beginning of a new, totally exciting era.”
The magazine’s first issue was published on November 9, 1967. Wenner was twenty-one then—a Berkeley dropout, “motherless, fatherless, sisterless, in the closet, starting a newspaper that nobody thought was going to go anywhere,” as Jerry Hopkins puts it in “Sticky Fingers,” a gripping new biography of Wenner, written by Joe Hagan and forthcoming from Knopf this fall.
In the music-journalism courses I teach at New York University, I often have a difficult time conveying the extraordinary newness of the practice itself. Unlike other disciplines, we do not have centuries of recorded history to parse for insight; pop-music criticism, as I understand it, began with Crawdaddy (which started on the campus of Swarthmore College, in 1966) and Rolling Stone. Most of my students were born into a world in which nearly every major publication allots at least some space for pop-music reviews, and their social-media feeds are teeming with constant, exuberant proclamations regarding the relative merit of hot new releases. That pop music dominates the cultural conversation is evident and presumed. Yet, in the nineteen-sixties, rock records didn’t command column inches in serious publications. Back then, Wenner’s insistence on the music’s significance and import—its relevance to the Zeitgeist, its abundance—was a lunatic gesture.
Rolling Stone was already thirty years old by the time I started reading it. For an agitated teen-ager in the pre-broadband years, holed up in her bedroom with a curling Nirvana poster and a trunk of cassettes and CDs, Rolling Stone was both a comfort (other people care, too!) and an edifying tool, helping me make sense of musical worlds that were otherwise overwhelming and inaccessible. In the decades since the magazine’s inception, new publications in service of a similar beat—most now defunct, it should be pointed out—had appeared on the periodicals wall at my local library, but, for me, Rolling Stone remained the unquestionable apex. When I was sixteen years old, I simply could not conceive of a cooler job than working there. (Those fantasies were merely reinforced by Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical “Almost Famous,” from 2000, which recounts the coming-of-age story of a young writer sent on tour with a gorgeously fractious rock band, then tasked with filing an insightful and poetic dispatch to—where else—Rolling Stone. I asked my parents to buy me a portable typewriter and a sheaf of typing paper for Christmas that year.)
In my final semester at college, I entered an essay contest advertised in the back of the magazine; the prize was a summer internship. That June, I moved into a small two-bedroom apartment on Forty-ninth Street, just a few blocks from the office. I shared it with three other interns; we ate lopsided cones from the Mister Softee truck idling on Sixth Avenue and sandwich wedges pilfered from emptying conference rooms. I remember being astounded—though not necessarily disappointed—by the respectability and rectitude of the magazine’s midtown office, and also by its air-conditioning. I suppose I had imagined only plaid sofas with cigarette burns, beaded curtains, sticks of incense, and frothing kegs of beer.
One afternoon, the interns were marched into an auditorium and introduced to the writer Tom Wolfe, who was wearing an eggshell-colored three-piece suit, a homburg hat, and striped socks. He may have been swinging a cane. I couldn’t believe it. I had read “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” as an undergraduate, and spent most of our meeting wiping my damp palms on my skirt, trying to muster enough temerity to venture a question. Who knows what I actually asked—I only remember that he was merciful, gallant, kind. He told us how Wenner had reached out to him, in 1969, to see if he might be interested in contributing to the magazine. His first assignment, a four-part series on the Apollo 17 launch, called “Post-Orbital Remorse,” later became his book “The Right Stuff,” still a defining text of so-called New Journalism. “At a time when everyone was saying you had to compete with television and write short, Jann just let it run if it was good,” he explained in an interview with David Browne this past June.
But while Rolling Stone began in a spirit of insurrection, it did not charge fearlessly unto the breach. In recent decades, many came to question the vigor and the relevance of its criticism. Legacy acts like Bob Dylan, U2, Bruce Springsteen, and the Rolling Stones have consistently received very high marks from the magazine’s critics, even for limp mid- or late-career releases. Rolling Stone, it seemed, had become hopelessly mired in a distracting nostalgia for the rock music of a particular epoch. As wilder, less august publications, such as Pitchfork, came of age, this vague sense of institutional suppression—real or imagined—made its reviews section feel inessential, conservative, and tame. Critics used to joke that there was a sign on the wall at Rolling Stone that promised, “Three stars means never having to say you’re sorry.” (In 1996, Jim DeRogatis, then a senior editor at the magazine, was purportedly fired after trying to give a negative review to Hootie and the Blowfish’s second album, “Fairweather Johnson.”) The magazine has also resisted modernization, thrashing against the digitization of media, a position that has deeply frustrated many of its writers and editors.
Then, in 2014, it ran a faulty and unsubstantiated story about the culture of sexual assault at the University of Virginia, which included a particularly grisly account of a gang rape at a fraternity. The story was later retracted, and the magazine lost a defamation suit filed by an administrator at the university (another defamation lawsuit, led by the fraternity, was settled this past summer). The debacle left many reporters wincing.
It is difficult to say what the next phase of the magazine’s life will look like. Rolling Stone has published remarkable journalism by some of our best cultural critics—discursive and brazen writing that would likely feel too indulgent to be published now but nonetheless remains thrilling to revisit, recalling, as it does, a time when magazines were strange and lawless. Perhaps the brand will be scooped up by some enterprising young millionaire with a big idea. Perhaps she will reach a new generation of kids in headphones, pacing around their childhood bedrooms, dreaming of a different, more musical life.
