Bruce Springsteen Takes Rolling Stone Founder Jann Wenner to Task for ‘Born to Run’ Slight

variety.com:

Michele Amabile Angermiller To paraphrase Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, getting on the cover of Rolling Stone was a major goal for any rock artist, and midway through a one-hour conversation with Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner at the 92nd Street Y in New York City Tuesday night, Bruce Springsteen had a bone to pick about that very subject. “I was not on the cover of Rolling Stone when ‘Born to Run’ came out, you know,” he pointed out. “I’m not picking a bone or anything, but I always felt — while we’re talking about it — they were a little skittish about putting me on the cover when that record came out.

I was on the cover of Time and Newsweek.” Wenner countered that those magazines were “the establishment” and that Springsteen making the covers of both was a subject of intense controversy.

Springsteen lamented that the attention attracted an unlikely fan: the Internal Revenue Service. “I hadn’t paid a penny in taxes when I was on the cover of Time and Newsweek, and the IRS found out about it and it took me 10 years [to pay it],” he quipped.

Not everybody wanted to be on the cover. Wenner revealed that Joni Mitchell was the one artist that did decline the honor. While Springsteen’s financial woes were covered in a previous book talk with Tom Hanks at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2017 promoting his autobiography, “Born to Run,” the Boss was on hand as moderator discussing Wenner’s new memoir, “Like a Rolling Stone.” Springsteen kicked off the hour-long talk escorting Wenner onstage for the chat, which took a deep dive into Wenner’s childhood growing up as a “typical post-war baby boomer,” making up his own publications in boarding school (he named one “The Sardine”)  and eventually becoming a student at Berkeley,