Our Thoughts On The Impending Sale Of Rolling Stone Magazine!

Today, it was announced that Wenner Media has chosen to sell its majority stake in Rolling Stone magazine in an attempt to "best position the brand for future growth". As you might imagine, we have some thoughts on the matter:

You know how some people like to think they're edgy and cool by listening to the Foo Fighters or Fall Out Boy? Those are the only people who still consider Rolling Stone relevant.

For the rest of us, Rolling Stone began a slippery slide in the '80s that ultimately led to them covering modern-day country music with the same zeal that 16 Magazine once covered Shaun Cassidy.

At the heart of this slow-speed sell-out is Jann Wenner, who, quite frankly, won the lottery by Mick Jagger not suing his ass the minute Jagger found out the name of Wenner's proposed magazine.

Wenner, more than anyone, knew this because, if the roles had been reversed and Wenner was somehow the singer of a world-famous rock band and Jagger the fanboy with a photocopier, Wenner would have shut it down quicker than you can sing "Jumpin' Jack Flash."

He wouldn't have been polite about it, either.

It is that cantankerous personality that worked in the early days, helping the struggling magazine compete against "real" publications who had the contacts Rolling Stone had not yet amassed, but by the time the '80s rolled around, Wenner's lust for social climbing began to take top priority after moving the magazine's base of operations from San Francisco to New York City.

Unlike now, where a band's every move can be covered by social media in real time to an audience of millions, those of us who grew up reading the magazine did so for no other reason than it was the only game in town.

Oh, sure, there were other rock magazines, but they tended to be monthly publications, whereas Rolling Stone's twice-monthly schedule meant the news was just a little fresher by the time it landed in your mailbox.

Of course, Wenner didn't see this as an opportunity to pump out twice as much content as a monthly publication, but to sell twice as many ads, thereby making copies of Rolling Stone both flashy and fragrant. By the end of the '80s, perfume ads seemingly outnumbered those that promoted music. This wasn't without its advantages, though. if you arrived at school only to realize you had forgotten to apply deodorant, all one had to do was rub the magazine across the chest and pits and, voila, the entire school now smelled like Polo.

What else did we like about the magazine, you ask?

If not for Random Notes, very few of our favorite bands would have ever gotten much ink in the mag. The venerable gossip-column section of each issue was where we first found out that Rick Nielsen and Bun E. Carlos had played on John Lennon's Double Fantasy or that Paula Jean Brown had replaced Jane Wiedlin in the Go-Go's.

Two words: record reviews. Back in the days before record store listening stations, or, for that matter, Napster, all kids had to go by when making sound record-buying decisions were the dependable record reviews by the likes of Ira Robbins (no relation) and others who kept our vinyl purchases from veering too wildly into the unknown. Of course, even we smelled something fishy upon spotting Wenner's five-star review of Mick Jagger's Goddess In The Doorway.

And, well, the stable of writers that Wenner amassed at various points was truly remarkable, ranging from Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, and Cameron Crowe,  to P.J. O'Rourke and, later, Jim DeRogatis.

Sadly, DeRogatis' tenure would prove to be brief, incapable of surviving the wrath of Wenner after publishing a less-than-impressed review of the new Hootie & The Blowfish album.

Before you could say "Darius Rucker", DeRogatis was back in the Windy City begging for his old job at the Sun-Times.

It was at this point that this writer stopped reading the magazine. For this writer, the accumulated goodwill Wenner had been cruising on for the past twenty years had finally ran out.

Since then, the magazine has continued to fittingly chug along on the momentum of its long-since-past glory days, much like the band from which it took its name.