Nowadays it is not easy for a man to say what he thinks. Even if, 56 years ago, you co-founded such an institution as America’s magazine about music, pop culture and politics Rolling Stone and 40 years ago the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a house of famous rockers in Cleveland. He experienced it Jan Wenner. “He has been removed from the board of directors of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the Cleveland foundation, which operates the hall of fame, said dryly on Sunday.
He was ousted just a day after his controversial statements about black and female musicians – and, of course, female musicians – were published in Saturday’s edition of The New York Times. Wenner just published a book The Masters, which could be translated as masters, in which he profiles, in his opinion, the greatest rock musicians. He tackled it Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jaggerguitarist of The Who Townshend’s heellead singer and guitarist of the Grateful Dead Jerry Garcia, Voucher from U2 and Bruce Springsteen. White men themselves.
PHOTO: Photo by Kevin Winter/AFP
The 77-year-old Wenner did not cause the scandal with the book itself, but with the accompanying statements in the New York newspaper. When he was asked why there were no black or non-white musicians and no female musicians in the book, he replied that neither of them managed to articulate the spirit of their generation as well as the ones he treated in the book. Then he mused a little more that, from the point of view of publicity, it might even be good to find a black man and a woman and include them, even if they would not meet the standards of the other people portrayed. Of course, such statements did not go unanswered, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation decided to try to calm the anger caused by Wenner’s ill-chosen words by removing him from the board of directors.
Magazine Rolling Stoneprobably the most influential music publication, he founded in 1967 in San Francisco with a music critic Ralph Gleason, who died in the mid-1970s. Wenner, a Jew by origin, borrowed the initial money from relatives and relatives Jane Schindelheim, whom they married shortly after the publication of the magazine. They have three sons and divorced in 1995. Since then, the publisher, which has a majority stake in Rolling Stone sold in 2017, in connection with a fashion designer Matt Nye. With the help of surrogate mothers, three children were also born to them.
