ROLLING ON: The music editor’s chair at...

ROLLING ON: The music editor’s chair at Rolling Stone magazine must be pretty slippery. Mark Kemp’s exit last week (with Joe Levy coming in from the features editor job at Details) is the seventh change in the position in less than 10 years.

Levy, though, believes he can stick where others have not, simply because unlike others who have had the job, he has no ambitions to write as well as edit.

“I’ve never pursued features writing as part of my career and never made writing part of what I do as an editor,” says Levy, who before his gig at Details served as the Village Voice’s music editor from 1988 to 1993.

Kemp, who is credited with helping give Rolling Stone’s music coverage a needed edge in his year-plus at the magazine, considers himself a writer first, and will now concentrate on that, though he’ll retain a contributing-editor credit with Rolling Stone. He also says that after working for years as editor of the L.A.-based alternative music magazine Option, he found the “red tape” of Rolling Stone’s corporate world frustrating.

Levy is ready for that as well. “I’ve been working at a men’s fashion magazine for three years,” he says. “I’ve got suits and I’m ready to wear them.”