HISTORY

A TRUE ANECDOTE: It is December 1992, and a shroud of snow and mourning blankets all of Prague, Czechoslovakia. The citizens are weeping for the recently deceased Alexander Dubcek, the man who had led his nation’s unsuccessful revolt against the Soviet Union in 1968. When the Soviets finally quit the country in late 1989, Dubcek, after years of internal exile, returned to his city to a hero’s welcome. Now he is dead.

The funereal quiet permeating the beautiful center of Prague’s Old Town is abruptly shattered by a shriek of joy: “Yes!” An American tourist hurries toward the source of the exclamation to see what could have caused such unbounded happiness in such a somber place. “It’s this,” says a greasy, bearded man, triumphantly waving a magazine he has just purchased from a street vendor. “I’ve been here for two years and haven’t been able to get it. Cost me 10 bucks, but it was worth it.”

It is the January 1992 issue of Guitar World magazine, featuring Steve Vai on its cover.

“Well, no wonder,” says the tourist.

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What manner of magazine would inspire a seedy expatriate to shatter the calm of a bereaved eastern European capital? What is its history2 To put it more succinctly: Daddy, when was Guitar World born, and what made it so cool?

The answer, or answers, lie buried in the mists of time, in the events of a year so remote that most current Guitar World readers were not even a lascivious glint in their father’s eyes when they transpired. Sometime in 1980—the same year that witnessed the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s victory over the Soviet Union, the assassination of John Lennon and the introduction of the Post-it note—Stanley Harris, a New York publisher who specialized in magazines about hair care and guns, and circle-the-word puzzle books, decided to launch a guitar publication. Yes, there already existed such an entity, a California-based journal that reported with dull but authoritative regularity on developments in blues, jazz, country, surf and, after a fashion, rock guitar. The fact that this magazine sounded and often looked like a church bulletin was entirely appropriate for a publication that was perceived by itself and its aging readership as “The Guitar Bible.”

So enter Harris, an amiable capitalist blessed with an extraordinary eye for recognizing a situation ripe for a little competition. It’s as if a little light bulb switched on in his head: “Look, that other magazine is ignoring the needs of a gigantic segment of the guitar marketplace-rock guys who dress in tight black jeans and leather jackets and who care about what’s happening in their world. These people want a magazine they can call their own.”

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And so, in July 1980, with little public fanfare, Harris launched Guitar World magazine. The cover story of that maiden effort was an interview with blues-rock legend Johnny Winter, then in the prime of his career. Also featured in the issue were interviews with Allman Brothers Band second guitarist Dan Toler and retro rocker George Thorogood, who’d made it big with revved-up covers of classic tunes like Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” and Hank Williams’ “Move It On Over.”

While this was clearly a magazine a self-respecting rocker could dig his decaying teeth into, there were also indications that Guitar World had yet to truly set itself apart from that older guitar magazine. For along with the Winter, Toler and Thorogood pieces were articles on the “Revolution in Jazz Fingerstyle,” “Pedal Steel Guitar” and a feature piece on the great country guitarist Merle Travis—all interesting but hardly rockin’.

“Although that first issue sold well from the get-go, I knew what we really needed was a hipper rock alternative to what was already out there,” recalls Dennis Page, an advertising rep Harris enlisted to handle the business end of his new guitar magazine. “While Guitar World’s original editor, Art Maher, was a good guy, he was obviously into musty country stuff, which wasn’t really the direction we needed to go.”

When Guitar World, which began its life as a bimonthly, followed up its debut with issues featuring jazzman Pat Metheny and fusion star Al Di Meola, respectively, Page says he told himself, “I need to get involved with this freakin’ book.” And so he did, hooking up with Harris full time to become publisher of Guitar World, a position he would hold until 2003, when the magazine was sold to Future US. Page shook things up by hiring a new editor-in-chief, Noë Goldwasser, whose qualifications apparently extended beyond the fact that he spelled his name with an umlaut.

“He was a hippie quasi-rock writer dude,” says Page, “who brought with him a lot of good editorial talent, like [Rolling Stone] writer John Swenson.” Under Goldwasser, the magazine’s appearance began to improve as well, losing some of the offhand scruffiness that characterized its earliest issues. Nevertheless, it took several years—and the 1985 arrival of a new advertising director, Greg Di Benedetto—for Guitar World to show real hints of the powerhouse publication it would become.

“The thing about Greg is that, unlike myself, he was a player, a guy who loved and knew all about the guitar,” says Page. “Advertisers liked and trusted him instinctively.” Di Benedetto, a talented rock guitarist who was not entirely satisfied with his day job—selling classified ads to doctors for a telephone directory—says he’d always viewed working at Guitar World “as a dream gig, where I could work with guitars in advertising.” When a position in retail sales opened up at the magazine, he jumped, and within a short time he took charge of the entire department.

“I walked the walk and talked the talk,” he says of the bond he shared with the guitar and guitar-related gear manufacturers who comprised his clientele. “They were part of the same rock guitar culture that I belonged to.”

What ultimately rocketed Guitar World into the stratosphere was the infusion of “rock guitar culture” in the magazine’s editorial content, and the arrival of Brad Tolinski as editor-in-chief. In 1988, Goldwasser began having the proverbial “creative differences” with publisher Dennis Page. “There were several problems there,” recalls Page, “but the most important one was that we were being seriously challenged by the arrival on the scene of Guitar for the Practicing Musician, which cut into our readership because they had song transcriptions in their magazine. I thought that we ought to follow suit, but Noë resisted.”

Ultimately, Goldwasser and Guitar World parted company, and despite successfully introducing transcriptions into its pages, the magazine, as Page recalls, “lost its way” for a time. “We started including a lot of jazz, which our readers didn’t care about. I knew that the key was for us to get younger, not older.”

The fountain of Guitar World’s youth movement was Tolinski, who prior to assuming the magazine’s editorial helm had worked for Page as editor of the brilliant but ill-fated Modern Keyboard.

“I knew Guitar World was in trouble when its editors came to me and asked if I thought it made sense for them to run a cover story on Slash and Izzy Stradlin of Guns N’ Roses,” recalls Tolinski. “Appetite for Destruction was then a gigantic success, and I thought it odd that anyone would hesitate to go with the most important rock guitar band in the world.”

Slash and Izzy did appear on the cover of Guitar World, and the issue was enormously popular. Tolinski officially joined the staff as associate editor, and in relatively short order became editor-in-chief, a position he holds to this day. “Brad was a dream-come-true editor,” says Dennis Page. “With him, for the first time we not only had a player, a guy who understood guitar and rock music, but also someone who understood the magazine business and magazine design and had a personal vision for what Guitar World should be. Brad understood that we had to be young, young, young, yet without abandoning our older readers. He was the missing piece, and along with Greg Di Benedetto, he took the magazine to the Promised Land.”

In other words, absolute ascendancy among guitar magazines. In his first year as editor, Tolinski scored time and again with exciting, vibrantly designed issues that struck a careful balance in focus between rising young stars (Zakk Wylde, Nuno Bettencourt), classic rockers (Aerosmith, Eric Clapton) pure players (Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Stevie Ray Vaughan) and, of course, Guitar World’s mainstay, Eddie Van Halen. If one had to single out one aspect of his skill that accounted, and continues to account, for the magazine’s success, it’s his ability to put himself in the shoes of the reader. This hearkens back to Di Benedetto’s concept of “rock guitar culture.” A lifelong guitarist, Tolinski not only belonged to and understood that culture but also was able to translate his understanding into every aspect of his success as an editor.

What ultimately rocketed Guitar World into the stratosphere was the infusion of “rock guitar culture” in the magazine’s editorial content.

“I wanted the magazine to convey to readers that we understood what it means to play guitar and be in a band,” says Tolinski, ”and that, above all else, it is fun. Taking a dry, technical approach to things has its place, and we certainly are committed to teaching the guitar, but Guitar World wouldn’t be as popular as it is if that’s all there were to it. Our readers relate to us—so much so that when they complain about something in a letter or an email, it’s with the kind of vehemence you usually reserve for a relative. That’s a good sign.”

That Guitar World is serious about the technical and educational side of the magazine equation is clear by the quality of the song transcriptions and lessons. “Jimmy Brown, our music editor, does a great job with our transcribers, some of whom—like Andy Aledort—have an enormous following among guitarists,” says Tolinski. “We never stop trying to devise the best possible tablature system, which readers know has improved incredibly over the years. We also feature lessons and columns by the best guitarists out there—players like Kirk Hammett and Steve Vai have been part of the magazine for years, and we’ve had landmark contributions by people like Eddie Van Halen and Jimmy Page.”

Guitar World has come a long way since Stanley Harris decided to compete with Guitar Player back in 1980. Tolinski attributes much of the magazine’s staying power and consistent quality to his staff, many of whom—like him and Greg Di Benedetto—are active musicians. “We work together like a band—everyone feels like they play important roles in a creative collective, not like some industrial cog. There’s lots of pressure at times, but it’s also fun—and I believe our readers are intuitively hip to that, because it shows up in our writing, design, headlines and photographs.”

Perhaps the ultimate barometer of Guitar World’s success is that so many players featured in the magazine today fondly remember growing up with the magazine. That also applies to the staff. Senior editor Richard Bienstock says he began reading the magazine as a 12-year-old metalhead in 1989. “I took lessons,” he says, “but I learned much more about the guitar—the players, songs, techniques—by reading the magazine.” Bienstock, who like so many GW staffers began his career as an intern, says he’ll never forget his first day on the job. “I knew so many of the editors just from being a reader. I’d never seen Jimmy Brown before, but I recognized him immediately from having seen his photo next to his column for so many years. It occurred to me then that I was probably more familiar with his face—and hair—than I was my own father’s.”

Now that’s a fan.e9781476855929_img_10033.gif

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