Book Review – 'TeenSet, Teen Fan Magazines, and Rock Journalism: Don't Let the Name Fool You'
Elevating a landmark publication and its audience to their proper place in popular music history
Author Allison Bumsted, PhD continues to do her homework, all in the name of pop culture and the humanities. Her specialty in The Beatles (receiving her MA in the Beatles, Popular Music, and Society from Liverpool Hope University) gives her unique qualifications to analyze and forward what is termed the ‘counternarrative.’
In this vein, TeenSet, Teen Fan Magazines, and Rock Journalism takes into account the little-known and under-appreciated era that eventually fostered the likes of Crawdaddy, Circus and Rolling Stone. Thus, Bumsted documents the 1960s perspective of a heavily skewed, male-dominated industry that intentionally rode roughshod over a demographic that was in fact, the driving force for music press coverage. But, really? Were those teenyboppers to be taken seriously?
The TeenSet cover, Volume 1, Fall 1964. Used by permission of Scholastic Inc.
The history of Teen Set began, undoubtedly, as a one-sided affair. First fashioned as an extension for Capitol Records artist publicity, its inaugural issue was a free album insert for Beach Boys diehards. But in 1965, the magazine became a standalone and the real work — for the audience who craved the inside scoop — was born.
Nevertheless, the agency adhering to teen fandom had already begun by way of the excess of Hollywood reporters from the 1940s — Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper and Sheilah Graham. But by the 1960s, aspects of blackmail or drug use were more tightly controlled, as personified by Brian Epstein, the Beatles manager. However, as noted by Bumsted, “Unlike other teen fan magazines, TeenSet developed alongside the rock press.”
One topic that nearly no one can take umbrage with is 16 Magazine and Gloria Stavers. Created by a trio of men in 1957, Stavers was installed as the editor in 1958. She ironically acknowledged that the core audience were females who at the actual age of 16, were already headed past the magazine’s demographic, therefore skewing the sight line to what would be now considered ‘tweens.’ Bumsted makes the case that in the span of digital-era research but still giving Stavers her due, 16 Magazine did not advance the cause of rock journalism.
Not that serious music critiques were what readers were craving in the pages of these magazines. Directed in unconstrained copy to the inquisitive dreamscape of young teens, the readership was fed thirst-packed knowledge such as “The Girl Who Tickles Elvis!” and “The Micky No One Knows!”
But where was the future headed? Bands were growing up and moving on, be it drugs, music experimentation or both. Tiger Beat had an advantage, based in Los Angeles. And while it’s not hard to see that ‘counterculture’ artists such as Buffalo Springfield and The Mamas and the Papas may have been to the radical left, they certainly benefited from press coverage in a publication like Tiger Beat.
What ‘set’ TeenSet apart was its origin as a promotional tool, as noted, for Capitol Records musicians. But by August 1965, it had become a full-fledged magazine, courtesy of and with the foresight of Brown Meggs, Capitol’s chief executive. Then, in October, Judith Sims became the magazine’s editor until the end of its publication in July 1969.
Sims would be the vanguard and figurehead that would propel TeenSet from a vehicle within the industry to one outside the industry. With no ties to Capitol (having been first outsourced to the Kimtex Corporation and then in 1966 to Regensteiner Publishing Enterprises), Sims was driven to represent a branier, more serious approach, past the fan worshiping into fan appreciation.
The Doors – Touch Me (R-Evolution)/℗© Doors Music Co., Doors Music Company, Apace Rights Ltd, Doors Music Co/The Doors/YouTube
But why the disconnect, is the overall question. The persistence in labeling teen magazines and TeenSet as ‘junk’ has been the answer. The rearview mirror legacy of rock music critique in today’s public eye still falls on a publication like Rolling Stone and writers such as Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs, and Robert Christgau. By association, assertions from authors Ritchie Furay and John Einarson’s in the Buffalo Springfield biography, For What It’s Worth posited that teen magazines hurt their ‘serious’ reputation, perpetuating the refuse-to-die viewpoint, and as Bumsted reiterates “Again, teen fan magazines are marginalized; the authors seem to underestimate not only the magazine but the readers.”
The placing of rock critics on a pedestal, thereby heightening the power their words have on a reader had traditionally been the kingdom of the straight, white male writer. But as the age of the internet re-examined the perspective of what was an acceptable form of the brotherhood of rock, so to has its reach managed to inform that teen magazines hold a rightful place in all avenues of popular music.
Nancy Chester’s Gibb, Slick, and McCartney TeenSet cover, May 1968. Used by permission of Scholastic Inc.
But was TeenSet a “radical youth-culture magazine” or “crapola white hippy jive,” both attributed to Mick Wall’s 2019 biographic Two Riders Were Approaching, referencing an interview with Jimi Hendrix. And how did photographer Jim Marshall take over 250 image exclusives from 1967 to 1969, including Hendrix, the pair up of Grace Slick with Janis Joplin, and “Dylan With Tire,” perhaps his most ‘compelling’ image for Sims? The readers of TeenSet gave them eyes at the behest of her knowledge of his work.
Ultimately, the character and tone of TeenSet weas propelled by Sims, who could understand and address as an equal to her audience. Her voice could be heard in the editorial column she wrote, answering why TeenSet wasn’t “heavier” (read: “More sensational”) and most importantly, that she was a writer on equal ground with other heavyweight bylines, even as she battled on with “The Powers That Be,” i.e. her bosses at Regensteiner Publishing Enterprises.
Sims and her freelance staffers reported on ‘scenes,’ in Los Angeles, San Francisco Boston (and in London via writer Carol Gold), giving context and definition at a time when this was an out-of-reach concept to her subscribers. The evolving visual of TeenSet, moving on from the ‘teenybopper’ look to one of psychedelia (courtesy of art director Nancy Chester) strived to keep the magazine relevant to the era as Bumsted confirms “adapting its cover to be more representative of its own developing identity as it was navigating this evolving musical and cultural landscape.”
Yet the slogan “THE NIFTY MUSIC MAGAZINE WITH THE MISLEADING NAME” was prophetic in more ways than it seemed. As TeenSet sat in late 1968 to early 1969, the covers pushed boundaries (Grace Slick in blackface; Hendrix and Mia Farrow styled as interchangeable dolls in an homage to John & Yoko’s Two Virgins) and furthered the lengths taken by musicians to be seen as both attention-grabbing provocateurs and denizens of the ‘new generation.’
Jefferson Airplane - Lather / Crown of creation ( Original Footage Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour"68)/℗©Exploration Group LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, Wixen Music Publishing/YouTube
TeenSet in its final form ceased in March 1969, but was resurrected in May 1969 as AUM (a play-off of “OM” and subtitled America’s Underthirty Magazine). With the all-girl group GTO on the front cover inaugural issue, coupled with the shift in the rock press paradigm, it was a galaxy and a half removed from TeenSet’s birth only five years previous. AUM lasted three issues due to a lack of ad sales and promotion.
The existence of TeenSet and its impact within the realm of ‘serious’ rock journalism has neither a neat summary nor a well-groomed finale. Arguments as to its historical legacy largely depend on where someone stands in the generation of artists it covered. And hopefully, as Bumsted puts forward:
[T]he consideration of TeenSet is only the beginning of what must be a larger exploration of teen fan magazines’ readers and teen music fans as worthy of study, especially young female fans.
TeenSet, Teen Fan Magazines, and Rock Journalism: Don’t Let the Name Fool You by Allison Bumsted, PhD is available from University Press of Mississippi, Bookshop.org, and Amazon in the US and UK.
