Wenner a Loser

Jann Wenner just put a whole shoe store in his mouth.

The co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine had been promoting his latest book, "Masters," which is a compilation of Wenner's interviews with seven of the greatest rock and roll performers of all time, such as John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, and Bruce Springsteen.  And in case you haven't noticed, they're all white male artists.  Not one woman or person of color is included in this collection of  interviews.

Wenner might have gotten away with it if not, ironically, for an interview he gave to promote his book to David Marchese of the New York Times, who immediately brought up Wenner's disdain for diversity.  When Marchese suggested that he could have at least included an interview with Joni Mitchell, Wenner responded, "It’s not that [female and non-white artists are] not creative geniuses. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni was not a philosopher of rock and roll. She didn't, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock."

Aside from the obvious obstacle to having a deep conversation with Janis Joplin - she's dead - Wenner came across as being like one of those pompous classical-studies professors who take a self-righteous tone to everything they say.  And just what is a "philosopher of rock," anyway? Someone who expresses the true essence of rock and roll in the music and the attitude.  All right, so maybe Joni Mitchell is too mellow to be a rock and roll philosopher, though no one would say the same about Paul Simon or Jackson Browne.  Certainly, that would mean that black musicians must be qualified to wax philosophical about rock and roll.  Am I right?  I said, am I right?

And when the subject turned to black artists, that's when Wenner really got offensive.  

"You know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right?" he said. "I suppose when you use a word as broad as 'masters,' the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level."

Well, excuse me, while I kiss the sky.

Wenner should have stopped there, but he went on to say that artists like Mick Jagger and  Pete Townshend represented "a particular spirit and a particular attitude about rock and roll. Not that the others [didn't], but these were the ones that could really articulate it."

So, it turns out, Wenner has never listened to Stevie Wonder's Innervisions, much less Bloodstone's debut album.

And for the icing on the cake, Wenner "conceded" that "just for public relations sake, maybe I should have gone and found one black and one woman artist to include here that didn't measure up to that same historical standard, just to avert this kind of criticism."

Wenner has been paying for these comments big time since then.  The Montclair Literary Festival canceled his appearance there while the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame board voted to expel him from the group with one vote in favor of keeping him - rock critic turned Springsteen manager Jon Landau. Wenner's new book should hit the bookstores with much less buzz than it had just a couple of weeks ago.

The big surprise about Wenner's attitude is why people are surprised.  Wenner has long been the typical white male Baby Boomer, taking great interest in the music made by those of his own race and gender and little interest in the music of everybody else.  If a female or non-white recording artist got on the cover of Rolling Stone at all when Wenner ran the magazine, it was usually for commercial, not musical, reasons.  (Madonna - no thinking person's idea of a real singing talent - appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone twice in 1989, and most if not all of the cover subjects that year were males.)  Not only is Wenner sexist, he's clearly racist; he once described critic Dave Marsh as having tastes "blacker and weirder" than his own, suggesting that all of those old bluesmen and funk-band leaders were just plain strange.  Please, the strangest thing Maurice White ever did was dress like an Egyptian pharaoh.  Also, George Clinton's blond dreadlocks make him silly.  But they do not make him weird.  (Marsh, for his part, said Wenner treated his own music critics "with contempt.")    

Wenner's only agenda is promoting whom he likes - and whom he's buddies with.  Not only did he try to prevent negative reviews of records of his favorite artists - Greil Marcus got fired for his negative review of Bob Dylan's universally panned Self Portrait album -  he shamelessly promoted artists who were savvy enough to make Wenner their best friend, such as Billy Joel and Foreigner guitarist Mick Jones.  So if you ever wondered why Rolling Stone gave Joel's Storm Front LP - produced by Jones, and including the incomprehensible "We Didn't Start the Fire" - four out of five stars in 1989, there's your answer. 

I don't deny that the artists Wenner cites in his book - especially John Lennon - have been among the most gifted artists who can articulate the true spirit of rock and roll, but white males hardly have had a monopoly on articulating what the music means.  However, white males do have a monopoly on the soft underbelly of rock.   When rock critics, most of whom are white males themselves, compile lists of the worst rock and roll artists of all time, most of those artists are white males - Dave Marsh calls the Grateful Dead "the worst band in all creation," and this is in spite of Kiss and Uriah Heep - with women and people of color getting short shrift. There's only one woman and one person of color on Dave Marsh's and James Bernard's 1994 list of the worst rockers ever, and it's the same person - Linda Ronstadt. Similarly, white men dominate lists of the worst rock and roll records of all time.  The reason for all this is because, since the record business catered to the lucrative market segment of white male record buyers in the 1960s and 1970s, there was more room for their junk than for anyone else's junk. There are spectacularly bad records made by women (Madonna) and people of color (rap), and I'm obviously not afraid to say so and never have been, but in terms of sheer quantity, most of the worst records have been made by us honkies. 

When you look at our track record (no pun intended), we white guys have a very sorry legacy.  Never mind the Grateful Dead - among the psychedelic bands we gave the world were total losers like the Strawberry Alarm Clock and the Electric Prunes.  We gave the world heavy metal (I mentioned Kiss and Uriah Heep, and I have to mention also Grand Funk Railroad), we gave the world yacht rock (solo Kenny Loggins), we gave the world soft-headed acoustic rock (America), and we may go to hell for inventing prog and being responsible for Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who had the incredibly stupid idea of mixing Beethoven with Berry.   And that's not even accounting for mediocre corporate rock bands like Loverboy, Toto, Journey, and Kansas, among others.  And, we invented air guitar!  No wonder women and people of color hate us - look what we subjected them to! After "Ventura Highway," "(Welcome To) Heartlight," "Rock and Roll All Nite," and "Hot Girls In Love," we clearly deserve it! 😃 

And I pity any woman of color who's ever had to hear "Karn Evil 9, First Impression (Parts 1 and 2)." 😃 😃

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As rock and roll entered its twilight years in the early nineties, we honkies felt pretty good about ourselves for all we accomplished musically, but at that same time, a new politically correct revisionist history of the music emerged - a history in which we were put to the rack for all our musical crimes, from Pat Boone's Little Richard and Fats Domino covers and Led Zeppelin stealing riffs from Willie Dixon and Howlin' Wolf to Peter Frampton's I'm In You album and Journey's Escape.  Only we didn't know that we were the bad guys until then.  We thought we were the ones with the taste, the style, the attitude.  It turns out we had more attitude than taste or style, and we made fools of ourselves by believing otherwise.  Remember how Beto O'Rourke, who fancied himself a cool hipster and an edgy but quirky family man, completely immolated himself at the women-of-color group She the People's convention when he couldn't connect with the sistas to justify his sorry excuse of a presidential campaign?  Same thing here.   As with every other act we ever perpetrated in human history, we thought everything we contributed to rock and roll was worthy of universal praise.  Only we found out that a good deal if not most of everything we did in the name of civilization, be it in rock and roll or anything else, was a crime against humanity that we now had to answer for.  And when we found out we were the bad guys, it was, like, the shock of our lives.

And that's how Jann Wenner must feel right now.