The Death of Rolling Stone

By Sean Elder, Salon. Posted June 28, 2002.

When Jann Wenner finally announced a few weeks ago that he had hired the British editor of a laddie mag to be the new managing editor of Rolling Stone, media critics heralded it as a sea change in American publishing.

"The U.S. music industry bible is about to be re-written," brayed the Guardian, a left-leaning British daily, "and its purist followers already sense the whiff of betrayal."

The Moonie-owned Washington Times, ever ready to re-fight the culture wars of the '60s, painted the hiring of FHM editor Ed Needham as a potentially good thing, one that might sound a death knell to the writings of Hunter S. Thompson and his imitators: "It's probably too much to expect a change in the sort of drug-boosterism that inspires pot-friendly travel tips, non-judgmental post-mortems on overdosed rockers, and hysterical posturings against the drug wars." The Los Angeles Times was downright nasty. "Shove over, you middle-aged boys, with your Bics burning at Bruce Springsteen concerts, your thinning hair, your love of 6,000-word dispatches from Tom Wolfe and other gonzo authors," read the lead. "It's not about you anymore."

But for all the Chicken Little clucking (caused in part by Needham's own remarks of the who-has-time-to-read variety), there is no immediate evidence that the old guard is up in arms. As with the tennis-playing mimes at the end of Antonioni's "Blow Up" -- to really date myself -- there is no ball in the air. That movie is best remembered by rock cognoscenti for the nightclub scene: The Yardbirds are on stage performing "Train Kept A-Rolling" when Jimmy Page's guitar starts to distort. He smashes the neck into an amplifier, breaks it off and tosses it into the crowd, at which point a scrum breaks out. The hero (played by David Hemmings) fights for the guitar neck and, having secured the prize, walks outside and tosses it in the trash.

Which may be how those boomers mocked by media mavens feel about the magazine. It has been a shadow of its former self for so long that most of us have forgotten what its former self looked like. While most of the press reaction to Wenner's choice of editor -- which came after months of speculation and supposed soul-searching on his part -- referred to "long investigative" pieces, not many were mentioned by name. (T.D. Allman's long dispatch from Colombia, the second half of which appears in the July 4 issue, represents the last vestiges of that tradition.)

The sui generis writings of Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke are seldom seen in the magazine's pages now, and even those seem like pale imitations of the original. The truth is that Rolling Stone has been such an undistinguished hybrid -- part '70s-style journalism (investigative reporting, distinct voices and rambling interviews), and part any other entertainment magazine you can name -- for so long that most of its subscribers are probably unaware that they still get it. Why upset them by sending some tricked-up men's mag with the classic Rolling Stone logo emblazoned on the top?

It's demographically impossible to please both 49-year-old rock fans and the walking boners who buy FHM (or more to the point, Blender, the Maxim-derived music mag that got Wenner trembling in the first place), so why try? Rather than reintroduce the magazine with a new facelift, guaranteed to be as warmly received as Greta Van Susteren's, why not do something altogether more radical? Why not shut the mother down?

It may seem like an insane idea on the face of it. Any magazine with a million-plus circulation (compared to Spin's 525,000 and Blender's 350,000-and-growing) is sitting pretty in today's down market. It was Rolling Stone's declining newsstand sales that moved Wenner to fire managing editor Robert Love, a 20-year veteran of the magazine (Wenner lists himself as publisher and editor, while the managing editor actually puts out the magazine), and it is newsstand savvy that British editors are believed to possess. (New M.E. Needham has actually been in the U.S. three years now, and his FHM is as Americanized as an afternoon of MTV and about as thought-provoking.)

Indeed, it was the whirring caused by Blender's newsstand sales that put Wenner in motion in the first place. With only seven issues under its belt, Dennis Publications' foray into the rock biz -- which bills itself "The Ultimate Music Magazine" -- is leaping off the shelves. Its magic-bean numbers are reminiscent of the advent of its cousin Maxim (whose seeming overnight success turned nearly every men's magazine in the country into a frat party a few years ago) and the effect on the competition has been just as pronounced. Even before Wenner made his move, Spin editor Alan Light took a stroll, ostensibly to start his own magazine, though his replacement, Sia Michel, has said she will make some changes that could make the magazine more Blender-like. And in announcing Love's imminent departure, Wenner also pledged to put his journal on a shorter lead time while speeding up the production cycle in the interest of breaking news sooner.

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