Rolling Stone magazine co-founder Jane Weiner has been removed from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, which she helped found, a day after an interview with her was published in The New York Times in which she made comments that have been widely criticized. Criticized as racist and sexist.
The foundation — which inducts artists into the Hall of Fame and was the organization behind the creation of its affiliated museum in Cleveland — made the announcement in a brief statement released Saturday.
“Jan Weiner has been removed from the board of directors of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the statement said. Joel Peresman, the foundation’s president and chief executive, declined to comment further when reached by phone.
But Mr. Weiner’s dismissal follows an interview with The Times, published Friday, and coincides with the release of his new book, “The Masters,” which collects decades of interviews with rock legends such as Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John is Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Bono – they’re all white and male.
In an interview, David Marchese of The Times asked Mr. Wenner, 77, why no women or people of color were included in the book.
Of the women, Mr. Weiner said, “It’s just that none of them were as articulate on this intellectual level,” and remarked that Joni Mitchell was “not a philosopher of rock ‘n’ roll.”
His answer about artists of color was less direct. “Of the black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right?” he said. “I suppose when you use a broad term like ‘masters’, the fault is using that term. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just weren’t clarifying on that level.
Mr. Wenner’s comments drew immediate backlash, with social media mocking his quotes and past criticisms of Rolling Stone’s coverage of women artists under Mr. Wenner. Joe Hagen, who wrote a harshly critical biography of Mr. Wenner in 2017, “Sticky Fingers,” quoted a comment by the feminist critic Ellen Willis, who in the 1970s called the magazine “Wickedly anti-feminist“
Mr. Weiner did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday evening.
In 1967, Mr. Wenner wrote to music critic Ralph J. Founded Rolling Stone with Gleason and made it the preeminent music magazine of its time with in-depth coverage of rock music as well as politics and current events. Much of it was written by stars of the “new journalism” movement of the 1960s and ’70s, such as Hunter S. Thompson. Mr. Gleason died in 1975.
Mr. Wenner sold the magazine in a series of transactions completed in 2020, and he officially left it in 2019. Last year, he published a memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Mr. Wenner was also part of a group of music and media executives who founded the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation in 1983 and inducted its first class in 1986; Its affiliated museum, in Cleveland, opened in 1995. Mr. Wenner himself was inducted as a non-performer in 2004.
The Rock Hall has been criticized for the relatively few women and minority artists who have been inducted over the years. According to one scholar, as of 2019 only 7.7 percent of persons in the hall were women. But some critics have applauded the recent changes, and the new class of inductees includes Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow and Missy Elliott, George Michael, Willie Nelson, Rage Against the Machine and the Spinners.
