+ Jack Bruce on the time Ahmet Ertegun, head honcho of Atlantic Records, didn’t want to release “Sunshine of Your Love,” which would become Creem’s biggest hit: “I was aware that I had a huge crossover song on my hands, but it wasn’t easy to persuade the record company people. Especially the big boss of Atlantic. We had done a rough recording of it and he didn’t like it. When I played it to him, he said ‘psychedelic hogwash’. He didn’t want to release it. I was very lucky because Booker T and Otis Redding came into the studio and said it would be a smash. In fact, it became Atlantic’s biggest-selling single.”
+ Dylan: “All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains & lovers who are really geese & swans that turn into angels—they’re not going to die. It’s all those paranoid people who think that someone’s going to come & take away their toilet paper—they’re going to die.”
+ There’s little more satisfying than to watch a pompous bigot, who has paraded his misogyny and racism around for decades with a sense of royal impunity, suddenly implode with his own hand on the detonator. The long overdue self-immolation of Jann Wenner came in what started out as a typically friendly NYT interview by David Marchese to pitch Wenner’s tedious new book The Masters, featuring his fawning interviews with some of the most over-hyped figures in popular music: Bono, Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Townshend, Garcia, and Springsteen. All artists so over-exposed that no one really needs to hear another word from them. Marchese made the obvious point that all were white men who played guitar-oriented rock and Wenner, the contempt for women and black artists drooling from his lips, just couldn’t resist the temptation to dig his own grave, jump in it and bury himself with the mud he’s slung for decades:
NYT: There are seven subjects in the new book; seven white guys. In the introduction, you acknowledge that performers of color and women performers are just not in your zeitgeist. Which to my mind is not plausible for Jann Wenner. Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, Stevie Wonder, the list keeps going — not in your zeitgeist? What do you think is the deeper explanation for why you interviewed the subjects you interviewed and not other subjects?
JW: Well, let me just. …
NYT: Carole King, Madonna. There are a million examples.
JW: When I was referring to the zeitgeist, I was referring to Black performers, not to the female performers, OK? Just to get that accurate. The selection was not a deliberate selection. It was kind of intuitive over the years; it just fell together that way. The people had to meet a couple criteria, but it was just kind of my personal interest and love of them. Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.
NYT: Oh, stop it. You’re telling me Joni Mitchell is not articulate enough on an intellectual level?
JW: Hold on a second.
NYT: I’ll let you rephrase that.
JW: All right, thank you. It’s not that they’re 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 ’n’ 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.
Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? 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.
NYT: How do you know if you didn’t give them a chance?
JW: Because I read interviews with them. I listen to their music. I mean, look at what Pete Townshend was writing about, or Jagger, or any of them. They were deep things about a particular generation, a particular spirit and a particular attitude about rock ’n’ roll. Not that the others weren’t, but these were the ones that could really articulate it.
NYT: Don’t you think it’s actually more to do with your own interests as a fan and a listener than anything particular to the artists? I think the problem is when you start saying things like “they” or “these artists can’t.” Really, it’s a reflection of what you’re interested in more than any ability or inability on the part of these artists, isn’t it?
That was my No. 1 thing. The selection was intuitive. It was what I was interested in. You know, 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. Which, I get it. I had a chance to do that. Maybe I’m old-fashioned and I don’t give a [expletive] or whatever.
A couple of days later, Wenner had been booted from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and denounced by the current staff of the magazine he co-founded.
+ Wenner’s aspersions against Joni Mitchell, Janice Joplin and Grace Slick ring especially hollow. Our own Phyllis Pollack had a “deep conversation” with Grace a few years ago. Slick had many interesting things to say and was much wittier than anything I’ve ever heard from Bono, the most banal frontman in rock history.
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