Never cared for grunge music much, never really liked the Boss. The Beatles were perhaps the greatest boy band to transcend the limitations of their initial idiom with more than a bit of help from George Martin and others. Few things rock less than rock and roll songs about old time rock and roll so, yes, I find the Seger nostalgia train pathetic. Boston would have been fine had the band not descended in to rehashing the same album in an installment plan. So there's been a lot of stuff that was praised by Rolling Stone where I just wasn't quite on that train.
But it's hard to underestimate the extent to which Rolling Stone went from an upstart magazine to the embodiment of mainstream entertainment establishment in its decades-long run. It may keep going but if Rolling Stone has crashed and burned in the wake of its UVA story it's not really possible for me to feel too bad if the magazine folds. If it's an end of an era then the more and more that comes to light about the conduct of Wenner and others associated with the magazine makes it seem as though the era needed to end some time.
Thus, some more stuff about Wenner and his legacy.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/jann-wenner-rolling-stone-sticky-fingers-allegations/545699/
In 1975, Led Zeppelin finally gave an interview to Rolling Stone. The band had frozen out the magazine after its critics panned Jimmy Page’s “weak, unimaginative songs” and Robert Plant’s “strained and unconvincing shouting,” but the freelancer Cameron Crowe, still a teenager, was able to break back in. Crowe’s editor, the Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, gave him some guidelines for the interview, including to interrogate the band about its “hippy dippy lyrics,” which Crowe did not end up doing.
Crowe filed the piece and received a phone call summoning him to San Francisco to meet with Wenner. In HBO’s new documentary Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge, produced by Wenner with Alex Gibney and Blair Foster, Crowe recalls the encounter. “I want to tell you about your Led Zeppelin story,” Wenner said to Crowe. “Thank you, we’re going to run it, but you failed.”
The piece had been too soft on the band. “You wrote what they wanted you to write,” Wenner said, before handing over a copy of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem for the young writer to study.
The anecdote is a useful one in the mythology of a magazine founded to treat the ’60s rock boom with adult seriousness rather than Tiger Beat squeals. Watch Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous, inspired by his time as a teenage stringer, and you see a similar scene in which the critic Lester Bangs, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, advises the Crowe stand-in to keep his distance from his subjects: “You want to be a true friend to them? Be honest, and unmerciful.”
In Stories From the Edge, Crowe now reflects on Wenner’s steeliness: “Jann could have easily said, ‘Run the fucking story, who gives a shit. That’s a real editor and a publisher.
…
The same anecdote shows up in Joe Hagan’s Sticky Fingers, a sensational new biography of Wenner on the occasion of Rolling Stone’s 50th birthday, but with a more ambiguous takeaway. By 1975, eight years into its existence, Rolling Stone’s initial exuberance for the rock-rooted counterculture had begun to ebb as the sound and the scene changed. Wenner had lodged himself within the celebrity galaxy that formed out of the big bang of the ’60s, and his writers hated much of the “middle-of-the-road” music that galaxy emitted. “Unless critics were writing laudatory reviews of best-selling superstars, Wenner generally considered them pains in the ass,” Hagan says, adding that Wenner fired Lester Bangs in 1973 for being “too negative.”
“This all created quite an opening for Cameron Crowe, a fanboy far too young to judge … too harshly,” Hagan writes. “Rolling Stone editors assigned Crowe to covers bands they all hated—Jethro Tull, Deep Purple—and to repair relationships with artists they offended.”
So it was with Led Zeppelin. Wenner did end up chiding Crowe about his interview, but the day that he did so happened to be the same day as the death of Ralph Gleason, the venerable San Francisco music critic who co-founded Rolling Stone. Writes Hagan, “In the twine of the moment, Wenner looked at Crowe and channeled the spirit of his mentor [Gleason].”
“The twine of the moment”: It makes it sounds like Wenner’s advice, as with so much else Rolling Stone–related, was a mere outpouring of sentimental nostalgia. The arc of Hagan’s book, an uproarious record of Wenner’s supposed venality, implies other possibilities as well. Wenner may have dressed down his teenage stringer simply for vanity’s sake. Or as a way of playing favorites about which bands were in and out. Or, indeed, to relay real and true insight. Possibly all of the above. Sticky Fingers insists that in Rolling Stone’s history, statements of higher purpose almost always served less noble forces.
Wenner commissioned Hagan’s biography but has since disavowed it as “tawdry,” and you can understand why. The book is obsessed with the tawdry, but more importantly it is moralist, examining Wenner’s exploits as if to put on trial an entire generation’s hypocrisies. It’s a particularly potent moment for such a reckoning. Wenner is not only celebrating 50 years of publication; he is also seeking a buyer for his magazine. HBO’s documentary is a neater polishing of his legacy, but it does detail the biggest editorial catastrophe of Wenner’s career: the magazine’s false University of Virginia rape story in 2014. And now there is an accusation of impropriety against Wenner, leveled by a freelancer who said the editor tried to trade work for sex in 2005.
In a year when the media in general is under fierce criticism—spurned by some of its most famous subjects, targeted by the president, and facing story after story of workplace harassment—the newly public gap between myth and reality at Rolling Stone is instructive. Hagan’s biography positions Wenner as a stand-in for the worst stereotypes about the celebrity-journalistic-media complex at large: driven by lust while posing as high-minded, trading on chumminess while also scrutinizing and ridiculing, a merciless friend only to itself. Stereotypes are never fully true, of course. But at a time when the culture’s gatekeepers are being actively reconsidered, Rolling Stone’s 50th anniversary invites less a celebration of an institution than an opportunity to see what needs to change.
One of the things that needs to change is the Byronic artist hero needs to be seen as a narcissistic and predatory creature. I've never been very sympathetic to Romanticism once I got a remotely clear idea what it was. Not that I'm entirely sold on the awesomeness of the Enlightenment, either. There's really no shortage of problems with either Romanticism or the Enlightenment to which Romanticism was reacting.
The way Leonard B. Meyer described capital 'R' Romanticism was that it was a reaction to the Enlightenment but it was perhaps most explicitly a rejection of everything that had even the slightest whiff of connection to medieval Catholic feudal society. In that sense, Meyer proposed, what has made the Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries so unusual is that if we look at the way it has played out in terms of ideals and ideologies this Romantic era has never, in fact, ended at all. Just because Chopin and Schubert died centuries ago doesn't mean the Romantic ideals and tropes don't exist in, say, the rock star.
For someone who doesn't connect to Romantic art, literature and music all that readily I can get why other people enjoy the stuff and realize that if you're the sort of person who's more of a classicist then, well, people can find that hard to relate to. By classicist I mean to say I adore the music of J. S. Bach and Haydn and even regard Beethoven as a transitional figure, not quite a Romantic and not quite a classicist even if later Romantics annexed him as one of their own. Of the Romantics I find I can appreciate Mendelssohn and Chopin (his piano sonatas are really good) but that, for me, the Romantics attempted to break free of what they felt were the confines of earlier eras of art without doing more than biggie-sizing the proverbial French fries. It was in the 20th century that Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Scriabin and others actually busted loose from the conventions that the Romantics kept telling themselves they were trying to break free of. So I find I love stuff from the 18th century and the 20th century but a lot of the 19th century leaves me feeling like it's bloated, overlong, self-serious and not all that adventurous. Wagner is ... eh ... whereas Haydn was amazing!
But then I realize as I get older that some people revere the people who are considered daring innovators, people who shake things up and break the rules. The music I'm into, I've begun to realize, tends to be the stuff written by composers and musicians I would have to describe as consolidators.
Which, in a way gets back to classic rock. The classic rock stars were not generally the ones who really "broke all the rules" or "tore up the rule book". What many of them really did was consolidate a variety of influences that came from styles and idioms that were previously considered distinct. Chuck Berry added country and other influences to his approach to what is now called R&B or early rock. Ellington, his son, and the arranger Billy Strayhorn could admire Delius and Debussy and Ravel and Rachmaninoff without this being some detriment to their work as pioneering black musicians working in the art form known as jazz. Which is another way to say that they were consolidators. These were not men who were at the dawn of the jazz era, these were not Armstrongs or St. Cyrs. Not in quite that way. They consolidated the range of possibilities.
To invoke Meyer (again) he wrote that the difference between a crackpot and a genius is often simply whether or not the solution to a problem is a solution that other people find useful and that a genius is someone who arrives at a method that is not just useful but is replicable. Thus for a Mozart or a Beethoven to be as daring as they chose to be with sonata forms someone had to consolidate the sonata forms into a range of flexible scripts that could be subjected to innovations. That someone was, well, Haydn, though composers like Clementi and Dussek and countless others played a comparable role, too.
One of the problems in music pedagogy, since a blog is a soap box, is that the Romantic era music theory and pedagogy grossly misread the 18th century. What could be presented as a flexible range of syntactic scripts became codified as a series of dialectical/dramatic plans, plans that became so predictable they were truly exhausted by the early 20th century. The time was ripe for finally rejecting the formulas that had typified 19th century approaches to large-scale forms in concert music. Romantic era music theory and pedagogy in Europe extolled breaking the rules but in a way A. B. Marx and other theorists created a kind of a double bind where the rules they advised breaking from the putative 18th century model were offset by formulating a set of formulas about what those paradigms were that can't be squared with the mercurial formal sensibilities of Haydn, the most popular and revered of the later 18th century European composers. If Haydn never bothered to keep the so-called rules to begin with how could you advise 19th century composers to "break the rules?"
But I digress, again, but then so it goes.
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