This year’s SxSW Music Conference seemed promising enough; until Thursday, March 13th (might as well have been Friday) when word reached us that the glossy, Harp Magazine, was halting publication. While to some of the editorial staff, it didn’t come as a complete surprise, it was a shock nonetheless; one that rapidly reverberated down to other writers, publicists (who didn’t want to believe it at first, or second mention), and music journalism enthusiasts alike.
After receiving word via cel inside the Austin Convention Center from editor-in-chief Scott Crawford, managing editor Fred Mills, later emailed writers to break the news. Two Harp parties, which featured The Sadies and Golden Dogs along with Jay Mascis and Thurston Moore & the New Wave Bandits, were held on consecutive days and went on successfully, the staff hauling copies in for the public.
As for the matter of what turns out to be the final content, it looks like Dave Grohl gets the last word with his bid for the presidency in an Election 2008 Special.

Cover Critique: Rolling Stone’s Barack Obama Endorsement
Designers weigh in.
By Dylan Stableford, Folio Magazine (courtesy of Music Press Report)

A pretty interesting survey of how various designers rate RS’s cover depiction of Barack Obama.

So, a couple days ago I went into BMV books in Toronto on my lunch hour and treated myself to a marked-down copy of this: every issue of Rolling Stone, front to back, on DVD, from 1967 to May 2007. I’m slowly making my way through it all — I certainly have no intention of reading every issue, though I do intend to at least browse through every page of the first ten years or so — and it’s fascinating stuff. I love all the old ads, the letters, the pics, and yeah, sure, what the hell, there’s even an article or two I’ve come across that’s okay.

I was hesitant about buying it, not because I don’t think it’s a good deal (it is), not because I don’t think it’s pretty cool to have at-your-fingertips access to all this stuff, but because I hadn’t read anything about the package itself, i.e., how well-designed it is, how easy it is to navigate through it, etc. As someone who spends an inordinate amount of time computing (both at work and at home), I pretty much have zero patience for non-intuitive PC gadgetry, and the last thing I wanted was some behemoth of a document that would be a pain to sift through.

With that in mind, a few early thoughts on the package. (There’s no point me discussing the contents; everything is scanned directly from the magazine.)

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AR: Tell me about the book. How did the idea first come about?

RM: No brainer, it was never not an idea. So many tried to do it over the years. I’m not saying that I was the right person, but the only one to get it done. After we started the website archive and then the new era Creem, the readers never stopped asking for it. Since Brian and I had spent so much time with the old issues over the last four years, we knew what was good and where to go. Greg Allen, our art director, had been working with us on the website as well, so it came together pretty fast. We only had three weeks for the first submission, then for corrections, proofing, etc. In that time I went to Rod Stewart, Alice Cooper, and Iggy Pop for their color comments, we’d add those while Harper Collins was doing test runs on the photos and proofing. And I’ve told the story how I, or how Brian Bowe found me…

AR: When did you meet him?

RM: He started writing via the website; little emails about what he was into, sensibilities and musical taste, that kind of thing. His love of the MC5 and all things related encouraged me to re-embrace my Detroit music roots as well. So, he started doing some reviews for the website. Richard Riegel and Dave DiMartino were always touchstones with the website archive, the direction we should be taking it, that kind of thing. I asked them how we were going to find the next editor. They both had the same take as Brian began to write more, saying how they enjoyed his work - kind of casting their votes without knowing it. Brian in turn brought some fine new young blood in, writers that he had in his class at Grand Valley. So, his expertise would be from being a journalism professor, working at a couple of newspapers and editing the Creem website the past four years. By any means, the way that Brian got involved was, as we say, very blowjobian. Creem brought Brian out to Coachella the year the Stooges reformed. I gave him my extra photo pass and a camera and took him into the pit to see the Stooges up close. While waiting for them to start, I told him how we thought that he should be the first editor of Creem in its new life. The Stooges tore into “Loose” and that was that.

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Strumming, Picking, and Shredding:

An Oral History of Guitar Player Part 8: Michael Molenda

By Steven Ward

An original punk who’s listed in Who’s Who in California Rock, Michael Molenda launched San Francisco’s first rock and roll multimedia show (Streetbeat), published the Bay Area’s first gear newsletter, opened two seminal “S.F. scene” recording studios, and has his name imprinted on a plaque hanging at Alcatraz (for his musical score to We Hold the Rock, about the Indian occupation of the island). Currently, Molenda is Editor in Chief of Guitar Player, co-owns Tiki Town Studios in Mill Valley, California (with producer Scott Mathews), and performs in The Trouble With Monkeys and the Eva Jay Fortune Band.

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“Teaching readers how to sound better and play better…”

“Ed Sengstack and Ross Garnick–the magazine’s publisher and associate publisher, respectively–were concerned about GP’s industry reputation and circulation around 1996, and they contacted me about taking the Editor in Chief role. At the time, there hadn’t been anyone in that position for a while. Joe Gore was Senior Editor, Dominic Milano was Editorial Director, and the hierarchy of command, so to speak, wasn’t as clean or as explicit as Ed and Ross wanted it. Also, Joe was leaving–or reducing his responsibilities–to pursue his career as a guitarist. I was the Editor of Electronic Musician back then, and, thanks to the exploding home-studio market, I had a somewhat undeserved reputation as someone who could overhaul a magazine’s content to secure more readers and advertisers. I had always loved GP, so I was extremely flattered they were interested in me. And, yeah, I wanted the job! Sadly, the day of my big interview with the GP staff was the same day my then-wife informed me she wanted a divorce. I was devastated, of course, and I felt that two life-changing events at once might be a bit much. I turned down the offer, and Richard Johnston was ultimately moved into the top spot at GP. Fast-forward about two years, and Ed and Ross still weren’t satisfied with GP’s reputation and circulation. In a deja-vu-like situation, they contacted me again, and, this time, I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my getting the best job I would ever be offered. Richard was moved over to the Editor in Chief position at Bass Player (which made sense, as he was/is a brilliant bassist), and I left Electronic Musician to become the Editor in Chief of Guitar Player. Thanks to a fabulous staff, we redesigned the entire magazine in one month, and, within a year, had expanded the subscriber base from under 80,000 to more than 100,000, and had also increased newsstand sell-through. Almost ten years later, I’m still in the Editor in Chief position, and loving every day!

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Strumming, Picking, and Shredding:

An Oral History of Guitar Player Part 7: James Rotondi

By Steven Ward

James Rotondi was the Features Editor of Guitar Player from 1991 to 1997, and was later Senior Editor at Remix magazine, and more recently Editor-in-Chief of both Guitar World’s Bass Guitar and Future Music magazine. His writing has appeared in Spin, Rolling Stone, The Wire, Mojo, Pulse, and the Boston Phoenix. As a musician, Rotondi’s resumé includes tours and recordings with Mike Patton’s Mr. Bungle, French electro stars Air, trip-hop pioneers the Grassy Knoll, as well as collaborations, sessions and gigs with Santana’s Michael Shrieve, horn gods Tower of Power, and pop legend Jason Falkner. An accomplished singer, guitarist and keyboardist, Roto has also played, sang and co-composed on over 200 TV commercials, from Olympus to Lexus to Quaker Oats. His new solo album will be released digitally and on CD this Fall (myspace.com/rotovybe) and he continues to work on film music with his instrumental project, Jettatura (myspace.com/jettaturatheband).

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“A serious background in metalloid shredding…”

“During the hot Boston summer of 1991, I’d been supporting my efforts as a struggling songwriter and musician by writing reviews for local free press publications like the Boston Phoenix and The Beat, and taking various temp jobs around town: filing, typing, moving boxes, making cold calls, you name it. One of the companies I got along well with was a firm called Miller-Freeman Expositions, which had a big publishing arm on the West Coast. One day while strolling past reception, I noticed that one of the mags on the little in-house news rack was none other than Guitar Player, which I’d read religiously from about age 13 to 19, but which I’d stopped reading during my college years.

“Well, as good as the old GP was, this wasn’t the old school GP I remembered; it was fresh and ferocious, with Metallica’s James and Kirk beaming from the cover and a big Richard Thompson Lesson across the banner. There could not have been a better representation of my own across-the-board tastes; a strong love of acoustic fingerstyle and pop songwriting, and a serious background in metalloid shredding. I devoured the issue, and Xeroxed the lessons to stick in my gigbag.

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Strumming, Picking, and Shredding:

An Oral History of Guitar Player Part 6: Joe Gore

By Steven Ward

Joe Gore always seems to make half his living playing music and half writing about it. His studio and touring credits include Tom Waits, Tracy Chapman, PJ Harvey, Courtney Love, Aimee Mann, DJ Shadow, John Cale, the Eels, plus many movie and TV soundtracks. He has also composed music for such clients as VH1, HBO, Intel, Universal, and the American Museum of Natural History. For better or worse, his music writing work has drifted from consumer magazines to corporate clients, though he still pounds out a guitar story once in a while. He’s deeply involved in music software, particularly Digidesign’s Pro Tools and Apple’s Logic platforms. He does editorial and audio work for both companies, and he created the hundreds of guitar tones that ship with Apple’s recently released Logic 8. His fave project is Clubbo, a megalomaniacal music-fiction experiment he’s developed with composer/producer Elise Malmberg (AKA “wife”). It’s a mammoth web hoax that alleges to depict a legendary indie label with a checkered 45-year history, complete with downloadable music, album covers, photos, bios, and miscellaneous cultural debris. It’s all fake, down to the copyright info and “external” links. He recently completed a Clubbo novel, and he and his wife are currently planning more and better fakery for 2008. There’s additional info at joegore.com.

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“I regret being too self-serious more than I regret goofing off…”

“I was about to turn 30. My almost-was band had tanked. I was sick of teaching guitar, which I’d been doing professionally since my early teens. I pitched Tom Wheeler on a world music guitar column for Guitar Player. He declined, but offered me an assistant editor gig at the mag. I filled out my first W2 and joined the staff in the summer of ’88. Later I became an associate editor, then senior editor. During the latter period, the mag had no actual editor. I reported to Dominic Milano of Keyboard, who managed corporate affairs, salaries, personnel reviews, and the like, leaving me and my colleagues to screw up the editorial all by ourselves.

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Strumming, Picking, and Shredding:

An Oral History of Guitar Player Part 5: Tom Mulhern

By Steven Ward

Tom Mulhern is a bassist with a background in electronic music. Mulhern is today a technical writer, user interface designer, and web developer.

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“I got intimately acquainted with The Elements of Style…”

“Although I started at GP in June 1977, I moved from the Chicago area to California in January ’77 to do freelance editing for their book division–to sustain myself while starting a band with my old friend Dominic Milano, the Assistant Editor at GP’s sister publication, Keyboard. The freelancing fell through, and over the next months I had a couple of crappy jobs elsewhere. In June, Don Menn called and asked if I’d want to come to work at GP. This was on a Friday; I started on the following Monday.

“I began as an assistant editor, which was probably better than I deserved, considering I was fresh out of school with a background in electronic music composition, rather than in journalism. Youth and enthusiasm, not to mention the needs to feed myself and pay the rent, motivated me to work very hard. I realized how green I was when confronted with a gibberish-like piece of text from one of our columnists, edited it, and got it back from Don with more red ink than black on it. I then got really intimately acquainted with my copy of The Elements Of Style–I didn’t want to lose this gig.

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Strumming, Picking, and Shredding:

An Oral History of Guitar Player Part 4: Jas Obrecht

By Steven Ward

Since 1999, Jas Obrecht has lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He teaches creative writing, writes for music magazines, and owns a record label, Avabella Productions. Obrecht recently produced Buckethead’s Acoustic Shards CD and Young Buckethead DVDs, with more works on the way. His book with James ‘Al’ Hendrix, My Son Jimi, came out in 1999, followed by Rollin’ & Tumblin’: The Postwar Blues Guitarists in 2001. He’s currently co-authoring the Vietnam War memoirs of Dr. Elizabeth Allen. Life is good.

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“Even music journalists were mystified by Eddie’s fingertaps technique…”

“On Ascension Thursday, 1978, I literally ascended from Detroit’s rundown West Side to glorious San Jose, California. A few weeks earlier, I’d foolishly followed my father’s advice and wore a three-piece suit to an interview at Creem magazine, where the lady editors viewed me as some kind of a narc. For Guitar Player, I went casual. Good thing, because editor Don Menn showed up barefoot and uncombed, in jean cutoffs and a tattered King Tut T-shirt. I liked him instantly. Hanging behind his head was a numbered Les Paul guitar that had been smashed on stage by Pete Townshend. Within a couple of hours, I’d also met Jim Crockett, Tom Wheeler, and Tom Mulhern, and I’d been hired as Guitar Player’s new Assistant Editor.

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