Magazine Sings Tune of Aging Rock Fans

Being a middle-aged rock-music fan can be demeaning.

Songs that roused your passion 25 years ago are thrown back in your face as advertising jingles for things like prune juice and pantyhose. The birthdays of every ‘60s pop icon--many of whom are approaching their own 60s--are noted publicly with amazement and titters.

And, sure, you can read about Buffalo Tom and Smashing Pumpkins in Rolling Stone and Spin. But these are clearly not publications aimed at you. Consider the extraordinary frequency with which editions of Rolling Stone are labeled “Special Campus Issue.”

With legions of aging rockers out there and no music publication tailored to their interests, there has been a gap in the publishing market that seems strikingly obvious.

“Obvious,” that is, now that someone has done something about it.

In Great Britain, the recent launch of a magazine called Mojo may mark the first major rock publication for 30- and 40-somethings.

At its heart, Mojo is designed for serious fans of rock music, regardless of age. But its content, the magazines’s editors and advertisers say, is certain to attract a mainly grown-up readership.

Mojo “tends to focus on those artists in whom people people have an especially large emotional investment,” says editor Paul Du Noyer, 39. “It’s pitched at people with a deep interest in music and I would expect the majority of those to be older.”

Much of the magazine is devoted to well-researched New Yorker-length articles about artists and events spanning the history of rock. Unlike other music journals, Mojo feels no need to peg its articles to new record releases or upcoming tour dates. It is more about historical perspective and cultural context.

The magazine’s November launch issue featured a 19-page cover story about the influence Bob Dylan and the Beatles had on each other. Included in the massive package were interviews with Paul McCartney and George Harrison reflecting on their connections with Dylan, and a transcript of a taped--and utterly bizarre--conversation between Dylan and John Lennon as they rode around London in the back of a limo at 5 a.m. on May 25, 1966.

Also in the first issue was a 15-page overview of Van Morrison, plus articles on more recent arrivals to the music scene such as Mary-Chapin Carpenter and the Lemonheads.

The current issue features 12 pages on the musical history of the Sunset Strip (“Sleazy Street: L.A.’s Fabled Boulevard of Rock ‘n’ Roll Dreams”), a comprehensive package on the Band, an 18-page photo study of blues greats and articles about Rick Wakeman, Carlos Santana, Pink Floyd and current British media darlings, Suede.

“We’re not interested in nostalgia for a particular period,” says Du Noyer. “We’re just interested in music that we think is so good it exists outside of time.”

Commercial success is not a prerequisite for an artist’s inclusion. The world of Mojo is a place where Captain Beefheart is a cultural force of such significance that he rates a 16-page spread encompassing a main article and six related stories.

The fact that Beefheart has not released an album in nearly 12 years is irrelevant. Mojo is there to give the California composer and musician (“Trout Mask Replica,” 1969) his due.

Advertising executives already are bullish on the magazine and are eyeing it as a way to reach upscale adult readers.

“I think Mojo is going to be a big success,” says Rupert Price, media planner at Young & Rubicam in London. “It’s very high quality. They manage to get their hands on rare photographs. Obsessive readers will collect the magazines like they do the records.”

Price notes that Mojo is reaching readers “up to 50,” adding, “Mick Jagger’s that age.”

One reason for the optimism about Mojo is that the publishing company and editors behind it previously achieved success with a similar venture.

In 1986, the British media group EMAP launched Q, a magazine for music fans who were too old for the teen-age quirkiness of the music press.

Stuffed with stylish articles on a wide range of artists, along with pages and pages of reviews, Q’s popularity grew rapidly. Piggybacking on the explosion in compact disc sales, Q offered innovative features designed to appeal to CD consumers. As record companies reissued classic albums on CD, Q published CD-sized “sleeve notes” about the music and artists. Readers could then clip out the notes and place them in the disc boxes.

“Until then, nobody was catering for anybody over the age of 23,” says Mark Ellen, the 39-year-old founding editor of Q, who is now managing editor of Mojo. “The idea seemed to be that you stopped listening to rock when you turned 23. You took up opera and golf.”

Q now sells nearly 200,000 copies a month--a fantastic number for Britain.

Mojo was conceived when Ellen and Du Noyer, also a former editor of Q, decided they wanted to take the concept further.

“It began about a year ago when I was still editing Q,” says Du Noyer. “A few of us were getting frustrated in that we couldn’t always devote sufficient space to certain subjects. The reason is that, in UK terms, Q is a big commercial magazine and is obliged to pick up a wide range of artists to maintain its commercial profile. If you cover a lot of people, you can’t cover anyone in great depth.”

Du Noyer thought up the new magazine’s title. “I fixed on the name Mojo simply because it seemed to me to represent some of the mystery that’s part of rock music,” he says. “To this day, I haven’t got the vaguest idea what a mojo is. It’s a blues term from the South. But what I like about it is you don’t quite know what it is.”

(In fact, mojo is African-Creole voodoo slang for an object that brings luck or supernatural powers.)

Mojo has not been distributed in the United States yet. But starting with the March issue, 1,500 copies a month will be flown to the United States and sold at selected bookstores and newsstands, including some in Los Angeles.

With Mojo’s sales already exceeding the 40,000 it needs to turn a profit, its future looks good. And that begs the question whether we will ever see the next logical step--rock-music magazines for people in their 60s and 70s.

“Right now, you can only go back as far as people who were teen-agers in the 1950s, when rock and roll began,” says ad executive Price. That translates to people now in their 50s.

“But as they turn 60 and 70,” he says, “you could conceivably put out a magazine that reflects that.”