So, How Does It Feel?

The times they are a changin’. Rolling Stone — the 35-year-old music magazine that took its name from a Bob Dylan song and helped define American counterculture — has hired Ed Needham, a pioneer of British “lad mags,” to edit the iconic publication. Needham helped transform — some would say debase — Britain’s magazine scene during his tenure as editor of For Him magazine (FHM), a men’s mag that forged the testosterone-fueled “beer and babes” formula aimed at 15-to-29-year-old readers, a demographic Holy Grail for advertisers. Now 37, Needham was a journalistic novice and a “very lowly contributor” to FHM when EMAP bought it in 1994 and transformed it from a free fashion journal into its current form. By 1997 he was the editor and in 1999 he went to the U.S. to launch FHM’s American version, which now has a circulation of more than 1 million and is the country’s fastest-growing magazine.

Raised outside Cambridge, in England’s rural heartland, Needham got a crash course in lad culture, “doing all the normal rural activities like vandalism, heavy drinking and desperately wanting to get away.” He also become an aficionado of music magazines and the budding punk scene they chronicled. “Escaping your small-town life through music is a well-trod route,” he notes. But for someone who has landed in one of the most coveted positions in music journalism, Needham took a rather roundabout route. After studying American literature at Sussex University, he did a sojourn in Spain as a translator for businesses, the 1992 Olympics and even Catalan soap operas. Perhaps surprisingly for someone who made his name titillating rapacious single men with photos of near-naked women, that was also where he began a long-term relationship with a Spanish woman that led to marriage three years ago.

Rolling Stone still has a circulation of about 1.25 million, but newsstand sales are down 10% in the last six months against the same period last year. So its tradition of 7,000-word articles by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe on topics as diverse as Vietnam and Eminem may be losing some appeal. Still, Needham’s appointment by founder Jann Wenner has provoked howls from professors, journalists and other purists who believe his efforts to give the fortnightly more punch will simply mean dumbing it down.

Needham insists the magazine must change to reach readers who now find dozens of media outlets vying for their time, but he promises to keep it focused on music. “I would just counsel readers to wait and see what happens before they start spitting bile or whatever fluid it is that they articulate their disagreement in.” In the meantime, will Needham buy five copies for his mother, as Dr. Hook famously vowed to do in their 1973 song Cover of The Rolling Stone if the band ever graced the magazine’s front page? Needham’s response: “I think the magazine’s kind of hard to get in England.”

Q&A
TIME: When did you get interested in music?
NEEDHAM: Back in the mid ?70s, about the time punk was starting to sweep away all those terrible old bores with beards and spectacular hair.

TIME: Were you into the music magazines or just the bands?
NEEDHAM: Music establishes a profound emotional connection?more than movies or TV. But I considered the writers the equals, if not the superiors, of the people they were writing about.

TIME: So are the people mourning the loss of Rolling Stone?s long, serious pieces wrong?
NEEDHAM: This is not the end of the long feature, but it will be the end of the long, boring feature. I don?t think people today have shorter attention spans, just more competition for their time.

TIME: What are you listening to now?
NEEDHAM: I tend to like what?s called miserablism. Introspective, fairly gloomy stuff like Nick Cave and Tom Waits.

TIME: Surely you don?t have a lot to be miserable about right now?
NEEDHAM: I?ve made no attempt to analyze it. Maybe I?m exchanging security and happiness in my old job for the complete opposite. But opportunities like this come along once, if at all, in your lifetime. The sheer adrenaline charge outweighs any negatives.