‘Rolling Stone’ Founder Jann Wenner Removed From The Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Board After Comments On Black & Female Musicians

The governing body for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame removed Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner from its board of directors on Saturday.

“Jann Wenner has been removed from the board of directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” a representative for the organization said in a statement.

This comes a day after Wenner’s comments in a New York Times interview last Friday, where he spoke about his new book, The Masters: Conversations with Dylan, Lennon, Jagger, Townshend, Garcia, Bono, and Springsteen.

When asked about Wenner’s decision to not include women and black artists in the book, he stated, “The people had to meet a couple criteria, but it was just kind of my personal interest and love of them. Insofar as the women, just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level.”

“Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level,” Wanner said. “For public relations sake, maybe I should have gone and found one black and one woman artist to include here that didn’t measure up to that same historical standard, just to avert this kind of criticism. Maybe I’m old-fashioned and I don’t give a [expletive] or whatever. I wish in retrospect I could have interviewed Marvin Gaye. Maybe he’d have been the guy. Maybe Otis Redding, had he lived, would have been the guy.”

These comments received enormous criticism of Wenner, who later released a statement through Little, Brown and Company, which published his book. “In my interview with The New York Times I made comments that diminished the contributions, genius and impact of Black and women artists and I apologize wholeheartedly for those remarks,” the statement read.

Wenner, alongside Ralph Gleason, founded Rolling Stone in 1967 and put the magazine up for sale in 2017. A co-founder of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Wenner was inducted in 2004.

His book, The Masters, will be released on September 26.