John Swenson, Rock Journalist and Biographer for More Than Five Decades, Dies at 71

30.03.2022 - 21:53 / variety.com

Chris Willman Music WriterJohn Swenson, a veteran of rock journalism’s early years at Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy and later a chronicler of jazz, died Monday at 71 at his home in Brooklyn. He was reported to have been battling cancer for several years.Swenson started writing about music in 1967 and became one of the most familiar bylines in music journalism in the 1970s as he moved between not just Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy but Creem, Circus, Zoo World, Rock World, Beetle, Sounds and the Village Voice.His music writing later appeared in Spin, Musician, Saturday Review, UPI, Reuters, High Times and Stereophile, among other publications.

More recently, he was a contributing writer and editor for the jazz publication Offbeat, frequently writing about the music coming out of his beloved New Orleans, where he had long had a second home. Practically anyone who ever amassed a collection of books about rock ‘n’ roll had Swenson’s name on the spine of at least one book in their collection: the original “Rolling Stone Record Guide,” which he put together with Dave Marsh.

He also edited “The Rolling Stone Jazz and Blues Album Guide.”The most recent of his 15 books was “New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans,” about the soul-shaking aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, published by Oxford University Press in 2011. Other books included biographies of the Who, the Eagles, KISS, Bill Haley and Stevie Wonder.The Rock’s Back Pages website has a collection of 109 of Swenson’s pieces, ranging from a 1971 review of the Who for Crawdaddy and the provocatively titled “Chicago: What Do You Think They’ll Call Their Seventh Album?” in 1973 to his coverage of Jazz Fest and associated artists like Irma Thomas for Offbeat in