She Loves You

“While women may not have invented music journalism, it is probably fair to say they invented the rock stars.” —Kate Mossman, from her introduction

From Rock’s Backpages comes the first illustrated anthology of the young women who covered pop’s founding decade from inside the room—interviewing the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones and other legends of rock and roll—before the stories hardened into myth.

In 1963, Andrew Loog Oldham walked his young band into the offices of Boyfriend magazine on Regent Street in search of a cover story. Maureen O’Grady, then seventeen and fresh out of secretarial college, remembers the Rolling Stones as five perpetually hungry young men. Mick Jagger looked at a sandwich on the features desk and said, “Are you eating that?”

Between 1960 and 1975, at Rave and Fabulous in London, at 16 in New York and KRLA Beat in Los Angeles, the job of writing about pop often went to young women—because few male journalists took it seriously. It turned out to be the best seat in the house. They interviewed the biggest stars of the era on tour buses, backstage, and in recording studios, before the musicians had learned to keep their guards up. Maureen Cleave’s interview with John Lennon produced his notorious “bigger than Jesus” remark, igniting a nationwide backlash in America. Their writing was funny, intimate, perceptive, and remarkably free of the posturing that would come to dominate rock criticism in the following decade.

A celebrated music writer herself, editor Kate Mossman calls what came afterward rock formation: the way a good anecdote hardens, retelling by retelling, into myth. Here she gathers twenty-nine pioneering writers—including Lillian Roxon, author of the first rock encyclopedia; Ellen Willis, the first pop music critic at The New Yorker; and Caroline Coon, who chronicled the emergence of punk—and revisits their experiences through retrospective interviews and profiles. Together, their work offers an unguarded portrait of everyone from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones to Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, David Bowie, and Joni Mitchell, while revealing what it meant to be a woman working in the music press: the condescension, the expense accounts, the men, and being thrown out of the Dorchester for wearing trousers.

Drawn from Rock’s Backpages, the world’s largest archive of music journalism, and illustrated throughout with photographs and original magazine spreads, She Loves You restores a generation of writers to the history of the music they were among the first to take seriously.