Bruce Springsteen asks Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner about ‘Hootie’ tale
Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner won’t be shamed for liking ’90s jam band Hootie & the Blowfish.
During a talk at 92NY on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, rock icon Bruce Springsteen asked the storied publisher, “I heard you once fired a writer for writing a negative review of a Hootie & the Blowfish album … Were you that wild-eyed a fan of the Blowfish?”
Wenner didn’t explicitly say whether the poor scribe got canned, but he called the former staffer a “then-temporary music editor.”
He further explained that the staffer had told him that their “proudest achievement was keeping” the band behind the schmaltzy 1994 megahit “Only Wanna Be With You” off the cover of the iconic magazine.
“At the time, [Hootie] were intensely popular,” Wenner told the crowd. “And I said, ‘That is the wrong attitude here. They deserved it, they were huge!’ Now, in retrospect, maybe I was right. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she was right!”
The band’s “Cracked Rear View” was the best-selling album of 1995.
Springsteen then teased the publisher that he was not given the cover for his own classic album, “Born to Run.”
“I wasn’t on the cover of Rolling Stone when ‘Born to Run’ came out … I’m not picking a bone here or anything, but while we’re here talking about it,” he joked to Wenner.
Also in the crowd for the talk were Wenner’s kids, Theo and Jude, photographer Annie Leibovitz, former New Yorker editor Tina Brown and actor Griffin Dunne.
Wenner just released his memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone,” in which he dishes on stars and VIPs including Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Cameron Diaz, John F. Kennedy Jr. and others.
