Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner has no shame in loving the 90s jam band Hootie & the Blowfish.
Speaking at 92NY on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, rock icon Bruce Springsteen asked the legendary publisher, “I heard you fired a writer once for writing a negative review of a Hootie & the Blowfish album… the puffer fish?”
Wenner didn’t explicitly say whether or not the poor writer was in jail, but he called the former staff a “then music editor.”
He went on to explain that the staff had told him their “proudest achievement” was to keep the band behind the 1994 schmaltzy mega-hit “Only Wanna Be With You” off the cover of the iconic magazine.
“At the time, [Hootie] were intensely popular,” Wenner told the audience. “And I said that’s the wrong attitude here. They deserved it, they were huge! Now, in hindsight, I may have been right. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she was right!”
The band’s album “Cracked Rear View” was the best-selling album of 1995.
Springsteen then teased the publisher that he hadn’t received the cover of 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 now that we’re talking about it,” he joked to Wenner.
Also in the crowd for the talk were Wenner’s children, 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,” which features stars and VIPs including Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Cameron Diaz, John F. Kennedy Jr. and others.