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