Rock Magazines! Why They're So Good

Rock Magazines! Why They're So Good

FEATURES

John Mendelssohn

You know what’s interesting about the rock print medium nearly two-thirds of the way through the ’80s? That so much of it is aimed at what you'd imagine to be the least literate segment of the rock audience—that which believes that Metal Rules.

Be that as it may, let’s you and I, free of considerations of the bottom line that make real-life publishers’ lives a living hell, dare to imagine the icteal rock magazine.

It doesn’t take no for an answer— when there’s a story to get, it gets it, regardless of anyone’s fashionable reluctance to speak to the press.

Its features elucidate the True Natures of our favorite stars, are rich in insights into the magical process by which our favorite music comes to be. It isn’t the pawn of the record companies, and

thus doesn’t write about people solely on the basis of their having a fairly big record and the record company making them available for interviews, but on the basis of whether or not they Really Matter. It glorifies no unspeakable assholes, in other words, regardless of how many platinum albums they may have amassed.

It practices critical advocacy by fighting tirelessly to rectify the obscurity of undeservedly obscure artists and by alerting us to. exciting new ones, in its reviews, which don’t take themselves terribly seriously, but which are nonetheless authoritative and impeccably informed, it hurls custard pies in profusion in the faces of the pretentious and vainglorious.

It’s full of photographs that cause us to see our favorite stars as we’ve never seen them before, and its art direction is so deft that the magazine’s nearly as much fun to look at as it is to read.

And finally, realizing that not all rock ’n’ roll is music, it writes about non-musical media and personalities from which and whom the rock-oriented reader is apt to derive pleasure, celebrates wonderful books and movies and TV and even sports.

While the magazine we’ve imagined doesn’t exist, there are still more very worthwhile ones on the racks as I write this than at any time in the past 10 years or so—more, in fact, than anyone unwilling to spend a disproportionate percentage of his waking hours with his or her nose in a magazine could ever hope to read. Take, for instance,

Musician

The art direction’s the most conspicuously professional on the rock rack, and very often inspired. In Charles M. Young and Timothy White, who were the two best recurring reasons for reading Rolling Stone in the waning ’70s, they’ve got a couple of very terrific writers. There wasn’t a syllable about W.A.S.P. in the ish I read for this survey, nor a paragraph about Ron Jim Dio, but there was a long interview with Kate Bush, who had yet to emerge as A Great Big Star at the time it was commissioned. Dare to call it critical advocacy! Nor did the ish exactly suffer from the presence of J.D. Considine’s typically authoritative piece on compact disc players.

I enjoy their preoccupation with technology. I enjoy knowing what make of deck 10,000 Maniacs used to make cassette copies of their demos, what kind of compressor Joe Blow of The Group Nobody’s Heard Of uses on stage. Masochist that I am, I even enjoy the ads for $1,900 digital reverb units. [Readers take note: I have a birthday coming up in May!]

All in all, Muso (as they might call it in England), at least for those of us who don’t believe that Metal Rules, provides as much reading pleasure per dollar as any rock magazine rolling.

Spin

Every once in a while, it does something amazing, as witness Edward Kirsch’s excellent interview with the apparently ultra-elusive Ike Turner at the height of Tinamania. Delighted by Tina’s success, everyone was quite content to believe Ike the monster she described him to be. Spin alone thought to get his side of the story. Hurrah, said I.

There was nothing nearly that momentous in the issue I read for this survey, but there were good pieces on filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard and Wimbledon wunderkind Boris Becker, and it cost me only $2.00, even though the cover photo . of Debbie Harry (the interview with whom cried out for editing, and Ipts of it) was suitable for framing. Neither Dio nor W.A.S.P., Dpkken nor Kiss was mentioned. There was a Motley Crue piece, but it was about Vinnie’s trial, and was interesting. Andrea ’Enthal wrote at length about Several groups I’ve never heard.

For my money, Bart Bull, their West Coast editor, js the best new American rock writer of the ’80s. His condemnation of Woodstock a few issues back made me cackle aloud with delight. His explication of why white America hasn’t clasped Michael Jackson to its bosom as tightly as it has Bruce Springsteen months before that (in another publication) was the most provocative, insightful, and prolix piece of rock writing I’ve read since Lester Bangs’s famous piece on wanting to do James Taylor grievous bodily harm.

The cover’s nearly always a thing of great beauty. But the insipid art direction inside’s a great deal more notable for what it isn’t (uncluttered) than what it is.

Hit Parader

I can’t picture anyone over 16 reading this. Which isn’t to derogate teenagers. Some of my best friends are, or at least were. But the kind of teenager we’re talking about here is the sort who hangs around on the upper level of malls in a studded bracelet and Iron Maiden T-shirt and polyurethane motorcycle jacket with greasy hair hanging down into his face, making his already terrible acne even worse, imagining that he looks dangerous and praying that somebody nearby will object to the volume of his ghetto blaster so that, if they’re bigger than he is, he can feel persecuted or, if they’re women or substantially smaller, he can snarl, “Hey, get outta my face, man.”

The ish I bought for this survey ($2.25: a ripoff supreme!) had a W.A.S.P. article, and an interview with one of Motley Crue in which the author said of that second most execrable and laughable act in the history of American popular music, “Few bands in rock history have had such an immediate impact on their generation.” There were also articles about Ted Nugent, Ozzy, Aerosmith—all these ludicrous old jerks who, if they weren’t encouraged by magazines like this one, might fade at last into the obscurity they deserve.

The art direction’s feeble and the paper cheap. (The pot calls the kettle black!) Next!

Star Hits

It has the most hideous logo in the history of American publishing, and isn’t exactly what you’d reach for first if you were about to board a non-stop from New York to Sydney, Australia which allowed one magazine per passenger—you could read the whole thing from cover to cover, in two minutes, twelve seconds through a fogged-up windshield, even though the columns in which it responds to questions from its obviously pubescent readership are strangely inscrutable.

But do we condemn a cocktail lounge guitarist for not being Eddie Van Halen, or Dave Marsh for not being Kareem Abdul Jabbar? No, of course. Instead, we acknowledge that Star Hits, every last page of which is in full, lurid color, has a lot of, uh, visual energy, and that there’s some subtle intelligence at work editorially, as witness the lyrics of Elton John’s “Nikita” having been published right alongside those of Sting’s “Russians.” Such a special Soviet Page would probably never have occurred to Hit Parader. (Did I forget to mention that about a third of the text of SH, like that of Hit Parader, is made of lyrics to your favorite charttoppers?) The issue I saw also contained a photograph of Billy Idol in which he wasn’t sneering. Talk about causing us to see our favorite stars as we’ve never seen them before!

Circus

Once you’ve eyeballed art director David Chodosh’s artfully designed cover, you’ve actually seen everything worth seeing.

Shamelessly glorifying such loathsome excrescences as Bon Jovi and Kiss and Platinum Blonde, Circus seems to have nothing in mind but to turn as big a profit as possible—whatever it imagines our kid on the upper level of the mall to want to read about, it’ll write about macho insipidly. It is utterly witless, utterly without a point of view. It is the MTV of rock magazines.

It pulls punches. “The drummer from a big East Coast band is letting his personal proclivities get totally out of hand,” Lou O’Neill, Jr. tells us in his gossip column. “When you start falling on the floor and twitching in public places, it’s time to check in and clean up.” But he never names names. (Sounds like epilepsy to me, Lou, Jr.)

Hard Rock Video

This is more like it, even though I’m not sure I’d lambast this self-styled Magazine of Superstars’ with my customary mercilessness even if it weren’t. Were it not for co-editor Danny Fields, you see, rock as we know it might not exist. But not for Danny, the Stooges would not have been signed to a Major Label, and the New York Dolls wouldn’t have become notorious enough to have fired the imagination of Malcolm McLaren, and the Ramones wouldn’t have played in London in the summer of 76, and the whole British new wave boom of the late 70s wouldn’t have been ignited, and lots of excruciatingly pretentious art-rock groups wouldn’t have broken up in embarrassment, and Elvis Costello would be the ruthless kingpin of the British cosmetics industry, and (self-) disenfranchised teenagers across the length and breadth of this great country of ours wouldn’t give themselves silly haircuts and spraypaint “Punks Not Dead” on the walls of freeway underpasses.

One of rock ’n’ roll’s great unsung behind-the-scenes guys, our Dan. Whom we now find saying (that is, writing), oh, “In next month’s issue, Dee [Snider] talks about the perils of fame, what keeps him going, and what he sees for himself in the future. Don’t miss it.” Danny, Danny. We hardly knew ye.

One recent issue suffered the shame of interviews with David L. Roth and W.A.S.P. and Ron Jim Dio. As elsewhere, W.A.S.P.’s interrogator failed to ask Blackie Lawless (talk about dangerous!) the one question that he screams to be asked—what’s it like being such a ludicrous asshole?.

But there was a lot of genuinely good stuff as well. There was an article by the ever-hilarious Rick Johnson, for instance. Richard Day’s satirical piece on how rock has affected sociopaths other than that murderous AC/DC fan also amused one greatly.

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And if you enjoy looking at photographs of Lisa Robinson with some of the biggest stars in modern popular music—and who among us doesn’t?—HRV is definitely the magazine for you. In Lisa Robinson’s Rock Scene, we see Herself, who looks 10 years younger in the mid-’80s than she did in 1970, when we were close, close personal friends (the rich are different from you and me) and everybody from D.L. Roth to Dr. Christiaan Barnard, the noted heart surgeon, appearing tickled to death to be in one another’s company.

Rolling Stone

The art direction ranges from insipid to embarrassing, the latter being the kindest thing one could call the writing of such fixtures as Merle (Random Notes) Ginsberg and Michael Goldberg. The record review section, in which the best writers-about-rock in all Christendom once cavorted, is now the domain of a crew of indistinguishable nobodies, the superb Anthony DeCurtis being the most notable exception.

Still, it wasn’t Hard Rock Video to whom Prince and Elvis Costello chose to reveal their true bad selves, and it wasn’t Hit Parader. Which is to say that it may be loaded with frivolous nonsense a lot of the time, but Rolling Stone still hires some of the best writers in print and gets stories nobody else can. Think of it, then, as Elvis in concert, circa 1975—mostly embarrassing, but with regular flashes of incandescent brilliance.

Rock

Be fooled by neither the New Maxi-thins ad on the back cover nor the words Tiger Beat Presents above the logo—Rock (what a concept!) contains not a syllable about A-Ha, not a sentence about Wham!, not a single likeness of Rob Lowe. At the same time, there were pieces in the one recent issue on the quintessential^, uh, unadorable likes of Marshall Crenshaw, NRBQ, Midnight Oil, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

That, unless you’re a 13-year-old girl, is the good news. The bad news is that the writing’s pretty feeble. An Ozzy Osbourne interview starts out strong, concerning itself with our hero’s alcoholism, but quickly degenerates into the standard poppycock. A piece on the rise and fall of the Knack is similarly superficial. It’s terrific that they wrote about David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks (there was hardly a syllable about a black artist in any of the other magazines surveyed herein), but pretty appalling that the writer never did get straight which was which (Kendricks, not Ruffin, is the one who sings real high). Is there an editor in the house?

Some of the art direction’s eye-displeasingly amateurish. But some of it is absolutely sublime too.

Creem

To be honest, this is hardly the magazine it would be if f, Mr. Insufferable Know-It-All, were calling the shots. Much of the writing’s as insipid as anybody’s, much more of it (none more than my own at times) wearyingly self-delighted. A lot of acts that ought either to be ignored or at best harshly vilified are actually celebrated, and at (feature) length, solely because teens with the price of a copy are thdught to yearn to read about them. And I would direct the art very differently indeed.

On the other hand, in Richards Riegel and C. Walls and a couple of the editors you’ve got one of the fabbest foursomes in rock writing today. And what other magazine on the stands would allow the author to ridicule the likes of Giuffria or Motley Crue as relentlessly as I do in Eleganza?

Although you might not notice it for the interviews with all the usual heavy metal heartthrobs, a lot of the spirit of the gloriously insightful, hilarious, and infinitely irreverent Rolling Stone record review section of the early ’70s seems to have come to rest in these very pages.

So let’s count our blessings, OK? 0