Joe Hagan is the journalist-slash-record producer preserving Earl McGrath's closet
The 'Sticky Fingers' author on hugging a Beatle, and how glamour died in the 1970's
Editor’s note: we briefly interrupt the Scottsdale series to bring you this fantastic interview with Joe. Part four will publish soon. (You can find my most recent dispatch from “The Most Livable City” here.) – E.S.
VANCOUVER – I was gonna write this long, winding intro, but Substack says I’m approaching the length limit of this email so I’ll keep it short. Joe Hagan is a journalist and writer living in New York state. He listens to Rock ’n’ Roll and jazz and he has book called Sticky Fingers. He also just produced a record, Earl’s Closet. We spoke for over an hour. The result is this 6000+ word interview, which explains why I’m near the length limit. Sorry, not sorry. Enjoy!
HP: I’ll be upfront, I did not expect to love Sticky Fingers as much as I did. I was like, “I don’t really care about Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone feels completely irrelevant to me,” but I found it to be this incredible snapshot of the media landscape. Like, “Wow, writing and journalism back in the sixties and ‘70’s was thriving.” I don’t know if you felt the same way writing it or if you felt any of that same nostalgia.
JH: That’s true, that it was a really unique moment in time. The way in which the culture and this form of journalism were rhyming, it was the perfect time to be a journalist who wanted to break the rules and expand the whole form in new ways. You know, the New Journalism. This was like the renaissance, basically, of not just music and youth culture, which the book is partly about, but also this kind of journalism and the writers that made it like that, one of whom I got to know, Tom Wolfe. I’m sure he would tell you he was at the right place at the right time. But also these were incredibly smart guys… When I began to write, I didn’t want to imitate these people, but I wanted that storytelling richness, because the whole idea was to take the idea of fiction and try to apply it to journalism, without becoming unmoored from reality. But for me the closest I could get to it is to write about it, in the style of it. And I had the most fun ever writing the book and the most fun ever researching it because this is everything I’m fascinated with and interested in. I was like a pig in shit, you know what I mean? I was just loving it.
On the other hand, I felt like all the excesses of it had been pared away by the time I came into the journalism business. In some ways for the better. Some of these [old] articles that you read are unedited pieces in Rolling Stone that were like 20,000 words long. They were indulgent, they were kind of tiresome. But back then, you know, their readers were stoned… There was no internet – this was the internet. The way we doom scroll now you could read a Joe Eszterhas story about narcs and drug busts and stuff, and it would go on and on and on in these articles, scene after scene. You don’t even know if half of it’s even true or exaggerated or whatever, and you don’t care because you’re a reader of Rolling Stone and you’re listening to Jimi Hendrix on the stereo at the same time.
HP: You didn’t go to journalism school, and neither did I. Did you always know you wanted to be a journalist or did you just fall into it?
JH: I knew I wanted to be a writer in a kind of a broad, galactic way at the beginning. I had dabbled in journalism and doing some freelance stuff in college. It was actually a newspaper off an Indian reservation near my college and it was the most boring, you know, “Go to the council meeting at the local gymnasium and find out about the water main being rebuilt or whatever,” kinds of stories. That didn’t exactly inspire me to want to jump into journalism.
The first thing I wanted to be was Jack Kerouac. A beatnik, basically. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a poet. I wanted to just be some kind of juvenile delinquent, basically, but with literary pretensions. And I was always into rock and roll, and I was in an indie rock band in the ‘90’s. Just doing all this sort of young people, juvenile stuff…Then I got an internship at Rolling Stone magazine and I moved to New York. But even then, I didn’t even know what was going on around me. I really had no idea, I was such a rube. I had the vaguest idea of what an editor did, or a reporter. I just showed up. It took a while for me to flop around and figure out: a) while I love poetry, I was no poet and that was probably not going to happen for me, or b) I didn’t have the commitment to see it through, because poverty is going to be your game.
In terms of journalism school, let me just say that I’ll never forget I was a fact checker at Esquire magazine. It was the late ‘90’s, and there’s this young woman who came in one day and sat next to me, and she was also going to be a fact checker. She had just come from Columbia Journalism School. She owed $20,000 in school debt or something, and I was sitting in the exact same place as her. I just thought, “Well, I’m glad I didn’t do that!” Yeah. And I remember talking to a guy named Scott Raab... He was an old school guy from Cleveland, and he’d done it all: written gigantic articles in Esquire, before that he had been at GQ… and he had GQ tattooed on his forearm. I was just like, “This guy is from another planet.” I remember asking him, really straight up, “How am I going to make it in this business?” And he goes, “Just stick around. Everybody else here is going to fall away. They’re all going to get tired of it. They’re going to run out of mojo. And if you’re good, you’re going to be the last man standing.” So persistence, basically, this own oldest piece of advice in the book, but at the time, I took it really seriously. And it turned out to be true. I just kept banging away at it. Eventually, if you have some skills, and you get the opportunity, when that opportunity does come up… you feel the weight of the world on you, but you also feel intense energy to succeed and that moment, when those two things come together, is like your big bang.
After I got my first feature, I knew this was for me. This was what I wanted to do.
HP: What was your first feature about?
JH: After fact checking. I got a job at SmartMoney.com and I was actually on the mutual funds beat… The dot-com boom was blowing up and they were just throwing warm bodies at stories about stocks and bonds and stuff. You didn’t need to know what you’re talking about – and I didn’t. I didn’t even know what a mutual fund was until I walked into the building and they said “You’re on the mutual fund beat.” That’s how stupid the whole thing was.
But one of the characters I came across was this guy named doctor Mark Mobius. Dr. Mobius. If that sounds like Dr. No, or some evil James Bond character, well, he was. He wore Nehru-style suits – with those short collars – he was totally bald like Kojak. And he was very stern looking and had all these aphorisms and wisdom about finances. He lived in a private jet and he flew all around the world. He was always in Hong Kong every time I tried to call him…I’d do these interviews with him and he was always such a mysterious, interesting character to me, so I pitched him as a profile to this magazine. I said, “This guy’s the face of globalization (which was the big buzzword at the time)… let me profile him.”
Now, you have to understand, at the time, there was all this money sloshing around in the world. So they took me, a nobody who knew nothing, and they sent me to Indonesia for ten days to hang out with this guy and fly around on his private jet and have all these misadventures. And they assigned me this incredibly high quality photographer: Philip James Griffiths, who was the president of Magnum Photography. It was ridiculous, really. But of course, when I went I had the frickin’ time of my life. I was basically under the wing of this old Welshman, this photographer who had been to Vietnam, had taken pictures of piles of carcasses during Vietnam, you know, had seen it all. I remember going to meet him on a motorcycle taxi clinging to the back of some guy who was zipping it out of just horrible traffic in Jakarta with smog everywhere. I’m choking to death and I’m like “How the hell did I get here?” It’s 110 degrees fahrenheit. There’s cars on fire on the side of the road. It was like, “This is exciting!” I felt like I was in Indiana Jones.
Just a quick little anecdote. A couple of days later, we went to the next island over and we landed at this tiny airport. A little one lane airport with a stone slab building for a terminal. And we met Dr. Mobius there, who has flown in on his private jet. He’s got all these SUVs and he and all of his men, his financial analysts and stuff, they all pile into these things. Next thing you know, I’m sitting next to him with my tape recorder. We go out – way out into the jungle in the middle of nowhere – and we’re invited by this giant paper production plant to come out to this jungle field, where we sit under a gazebo and have lunch and are given an elephant show, where they bring these elephants out and these people on costumes, ride them and do like dances. Like, choreographed elephant dances. And then they play soccer with a giant soccer ball.
HP: Oh god.
JH: They brought Mobius out onto the field, and by this time, the entire factory – they’re all in these blue smocks, kind of crowded around – they bring an elephant out with a giant wreath at its trunk. And Mobius bows down, and the elephant puts the wreath around his neck, and all the employees are clapping and roaring with delight because they want him to invest money in this factory. I was like “This is The Heart of Darkness, man, what am I in? This is insane.” And I remember looking over at Philip James Griffiths, who had this arch kind of eyebrowed Welshman vibe and I said “Keep snapping, man. Keep snappin’ that [camera]”. He gets all these insane pictures. And so, you know, whatever, I came back from this crazy adventure, and then I had my first feature. It was the happiest moment of my life practically, I was so thrilled.
HP: In terms of first features, I can’t think of something better than going to Indonesia
JH: I was lucky. Lucky because I just ran so hard at this thing and wanted it so bad and I was so nervous to get it right. It’s probably not even my best… by far not my best piece, actually. But I did as good as I could at the time. And it worked, you know?
HP: Were you a “first one in, last one out” kinda guy at that point?
JH: I was never an office guy, and I always really sort of bristled at office politics. I had another friend who’s now a big investigative reporter at The New York Times, Danny Hakim. We thought we were cooler than everybody else. In fact, none of us were cool because we were there, at SmartMoney… And at the time, I will say that we worshiped at the altar of the New York Observer. It was the most snarky, funny, smart, cool kids, bitchy newspaper. It was definitely a precursor to Gawker, but way more literary in its intent. And eventually Danny went to the Times and I went there [to the Observer].
That was a big move for me. I took a big pay cut because, after the dot-com market collapsed, they stopped paying the nice salaries. But I always wanted to work there. It was going to be my career moment. I said “I’m doing it, I’ll just lower my cost basis of life and I’m doing it.” And I did. I went there, begged for a job and [Observer editor] Peter Kaplan gave it to me. He saw that I was what he would want, which is a desperate young man that wants to come in and just do whatever he says. They gave me a column and I had to produce a 2000 word column once a week. That’ll train you up real fast, as they say.
HP: No kidding. Before I forget, you mentioned you were in a band. Is there any evidence of this online?
JH: I hope not. Before I moved to New York, I was living in Asheville, North Carolina, which is now a really bustling destination in the South. My parents were living down there, and so I moved down there after college to hang out there for a while. This was the Gen-X slacker era. In the early 90’s, the economy was in the shitter. People were just hanging around. You got a job, did as little work as you could possibly get away with doing, lived as low as you could with a bunch of other people in some house or apartment. Everybody starts a rock band and everybody’s a poet and everybody’s an artist. And you sit around watching David Lynch movies and stuff. And so during that period, before I went to New York, that’s what I was doing. I was in a couple of rock bands. The highest moment was when we opened for a couple of bands that were actually known and had record labels. It was Archers of Loaf, and this other math rock band. We were probably pretty bad but it was great fun.
As an aside, my low level job at the time was kind of working as an office lackey, making the copies at a writing program at Warren Wilson College. They had an MFA writing program, and it was low residency, which means that two or three times a year there’d be a big convergence on campus of all these writers. A lot of them were big: big writers, big poets, big novelists. And one of the students was an editor – a poetry student – was an editor at Rolling Stone. Of course, I had platinum blonde hair and I looked like a punk rocker. I begged her for an internship and she got me one and it was off to the races.
HP: I know that you listen to a lot of music, but I notice most of it is somewhat older. Do you listen to anything modern – or are you just living in the past?
JH: I listen to everything modern because I have kids. So I’m constantly exposed to whatever the new pop thing is. Now my kids are into Lovejoy. They love all the British stuff. Arctic Monkeys… But I would say that there comes a time – and I just hate admitting this, this is a confession – but after a certain age, I just no longer relate to songs that were written and directed at 20 year olds… I’m trying to think of the last band that had relevance and was on the cutting edge of what was happening, that I was devoted to… I was really into this Japanese doom metal band, Boris. I interviewed them once, through an interpreter. It didn’t go that well. But I love that music because it was just great. It was exotic and fun and overwhelmingly loud.
The emotional tenor of a lot of music is made and built for young people, it’s about young people’s emotions. I remember telling myself all through my youth, “If you ever start listening to jazz, you’ll know it’s over.” Right? And when I started listening to jazz and realizing that’s what I wanted to listen to, I knew it was over. But I’m a record collector. I love crate digging for things I’ve never heard before and obscurities. I’ve become like an archivist of the past. And there’s a journalistic element to it, you know? My musical tastes are almost led by my journalism now, my instincts for journalism because I’m looking for stories, I’m looking for subplots that I never knew about and connections that I never found before, which is where this whole Earl’s Closet LP that I just produced came out of.
HP: I know you’ve done a fair bit of press on the LP already… but you basically found a music treasure trove in a closet?
JH: The whole thing comes out of my book, Sticky Fingers, because I had interviewed a guy named Earl McGrath who I had been told was sort of a little known, but highly pivotal, figure for lots of people in the ‘70’s. I didn’t really know much about him, but I found him and convinced him to give me an interview. He was reluctant to do it because he was a very private, off the record kind of guy. But I sort of browbeat him about it and ended up in his apartment one summer in 2015. He lived on West 57th Street.
He had been this kind of a tastemaker and an art collector. He was married to an Italian princess. And in a certain way, he was kind of a kept man. He didn’t really have to do anything [to make a living], but he had a lot of cultural tastes. He loved art. He was ahead of his time in befriending and promoting artists like Rauschenberg and Ed Ruscha and Bruce Nauman. He was friends with Cy Twombly and all these very famous artists of the 20th century, and he had known them when they were just starting out, he collected their works, and some of them did portraits of him and his wife. He went to Hollywood to be a screenwriter, and then he befriended Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records and became a record executive through the ‘70’s. But it was just like everything else he did in his life, kind of a lark.
And he befriends Mick Jagger, and Mick Jagger hires him to run his label. If you listen to the song “Shattered” by the Rolling Stones, it’s about New York City in the late ‘70’s, and it’s bed bugs and rats, but you’re still having fun in this kind of dirty, rotten city. That was the New York of Earl McGrath, and Earl was basically Mick Jagger’s wingman. They hung out together. He sort of, I think, helped Mick understand art at a time when those guys were buying art and suddenly they’re meeting artists and they’re part of the art scene. He was a salon host with his wife, who photographed their lives and documented them in photo books for 40 years; the book Face to Face: the Photography of Camilla McGrath is an extraordinary book. You open it up and it’s like “This happened?” It’s this private world, where like Harrison Ford and Andy Warhol are all in the same living room hanging out. You know, it’s crazy.
HP: Back when there was a real scene.
JH: So there’s Earl and I interviewed him… and I used him in the book. He’s in a couple of pivotal scenes in Sticky Fingers. Well, flash forward, he died. Sadly, he was old, but he fell... And I was Facebook friends with him at the time. I saw a post from the people managing his estate saying, “We’re liquidating his stuff, and if you’re a friend of his, you can make an appointment to come check it out.” So I said “I would like to look at the photos and license them from my book.” So I was there at the apartment looking at the pictures with my editor from Knopf… I went a couple of times to review these photos, and while I was there one time, I ended up snooping around, looking into the closet and finding these records and hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes. I was astonished. There were Rolling Stone studio tapes, demo tapes by Daryl Hall and John Oates, The New York Dolls. All kinds of stuff that was historical flotsam and jetsam from his time… really remarkable material. And they were going to get rid of it… So I made the decision to buy it from them. So I did. I took it home, sat around with it. I had a reel-to-reel machine already and I started listening to them. There was so much remarkable stuff, and if I Shazam’d any of it, none of it came up. I would look on Google and it was just like “No, this stuff is unheard.” Eventually I got in touch with this label, Light In The Attic Records. I gave them a pitch about it called Earl’s Closet. They loved it and decided to do it.
And for me, again, journalism. I came back to this idea that, “Oh, I’m going to curate an album and they’re going to publish a 20 page essay that I’m going to write [that comes with the record]”... Earl is like the great unknown, influential guy of the ‘70’s. Part of my mandate was to bring him out of the historical woodwork and present him to people as a kind of an interesting figure – he’s like an influencer of the ‘70’s.
HP: Is there a book there, you think?
JH: I don’t personally think so. The most vivid, palpable way that you can understand Earl, is to look at those books of photos. They had a place in L.A. and a place in New York and a place in Italy. And in all three of them, you just see this insane mix of people. European aristocrats and famous artists, and there’s Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and Jann Wenner and Annie Liebowitz, and they’re all sort of in this weird mélange. It’s a glamorous world, and in some ways the last of a certain kind of glamour… It was the last time people were taking black and white photos on the regular. When you get to the eighties, everything changed. The aesthetic changes, the look changes, the vibe changes. It’s just not as sexy. You know what I mean? There’s something sexy about the ‘70’s, and this was the molten heart of it.
HP: You seem very good at cultivating an open mindedness around your career and, I’m assuming, your life. Are you doing a lot of yoga, are you doing a lot of drugs?
JH: I’d love to do more drugs. But no, I bicycle. Up until this spring I was in really good shape but I got COVID and I haven’t totally recovered from it. My life revolves around having a family, so that’s important to me, and I have an incredible, great group of friends. That’s probably the most emblematic thing about me is my friends, because I have friends from all different walks of life… I’m interested in creative people. I’m interested in people who have some kind of bohemian outlook on the world. It’s more interesting to me.
As time goes on and the world becomes more online… everything has become a little more plastic and a little less meaningful because of the nature of the internet… Anxiety is the emotional zeitgeist of the times that we’re living in, and the world that I kind of came up revering was almost the entire polar opposite of this. And so there are certain of us who thought of ourselves as avant garde, or at least being on the edge of the culture… and now find ourselves to be the most preservationists of this bygone world. It happens in an instant.
But I’m a very adaptive creature. One thing I learned from John Homans, who was older than me by 15 years, maybe 12… He taught me, just by example. He would bring a lot of millennials and zoomers close and want to know about their world, and really absorb it even if he didn’t totally buy all of it. He wanted to know about it. One of the great fortunes of being a journalist is that your curiosity will keep you fresh. As long as you remain interested and don’t put up a defensive front, then you can at least understand – if not always sympathize with – what’s coming up and what’s happening in the world. At the same time, I’m not giving up the fact that I do feel like there’s a value in and in being able to have a longer memory. So I’m trying to find the balance between learning and retaining what you know is wisdom. You’re trying to walk that line and trying to be a complete person.
HP: With your long memory, is there anyone who you haven’t either profiled or interviewed yet that you would like to?
JH: I would love to write a profile of Mick Jagger. I would be prepared to be disappointed, but he’s never written a memoir. He never gives access to anybody for anything. When he is quoted, it’s so boring – he’s a notoriously terrible interviewer. So the challenge would be to see if you could get him in an interesting interview. Maybe his greatest self-understanding is that he knows there’s no there there. But imagine his life, the iconography of it. The long view. He’s met everybody who was ever an icon in this culture, and somehow, through business acumen or whatever it is, managed to to maintain currency.
I don’t know, I think I’m less interested in specific people than I am in developing new ways to profile people. I’m always trying to figure out how I can break the form, or adapt the form to our times. And when I say the form, I mean longer form stuff. People still read them, you know?
HP: I wanted to chat about you meeting Paul McCartney… you’re huge Wings guy… I was raised in the house of Lennon. I was raised on the idea that Wings sucks, but there’s some great songs there.
JH: Part of what I learned writing Sticky Fingers is that, in the era when gatekeepers were so important, critics and editors could guide the thinking in the entire culture, in ways that would last for decades. If the cognoscenti decides that Wings sucks, that’s going to get into everybody’s head. People are going to decide it’s so.
You’re also talking to somebody who did interview Paul McCartney and who was mind altered by the experience because it was a big deal for me. He gave me a lot of quality time. I was hanging in his home turf, in his studio with him, and he was super generous. He didn’t shrink from any questions and went past me and gave me stuff I didn’t even dream of getting. As soon as I was done with that interview, I knew I had two big chunks of my book that were going to fucking awesome, because it was all about the relationship between Rolling Stone magazine and the biggest band of all time… It was the greatest interview of my life.
HP: How do you prepare for something like that? Did you have prepared questions?
JH: I was already deep into the research of my book. I came in prepared with a very narrow set of questions that were very related to Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone magazine, certain reviews, the interview with John Lennon – the famous one that was so excoriating – these very specific things. I also came with this Polaroid that I was trying to figure out the provenance of that showed him and John Lennon and Keith Moon and May Pang and Linda McCartney all cavorting together in a courtyard in L.A. So I came in with that.. and that turned out to be the key that unlocked all of these anecdotes. He started talking and I’m just sitting there with my jaw hanging down because it’s all just flowing into my tape recorder… He knew what he wanted to tell me. He was surprised and, I think, probably delighted, to find out that I wasn’t just an emissary of Jann Wenner, there to get puffy quotes. There was a whole moment where he says, “This isn’t just a puff piece, you’re going to write a real book, right?” I was like “Yeah.” He obviously wanted to throw some barbs at Jann…. He wanted to set the record straight about who he was, how he got treated, how he didn’t like certain aspects of his coverage in the biggest magazine of the period.
It was a billion times beyond what I expected, because what I expected was what he expected, which is that he was just going to give me a bunch of puffery and it was going to be cliches and boilerplate bullshit and I would have walked away saying “Well, at least I met him.” But it was: I met him and he gave me incredible material and he gave me a tour of his studio and we hung out.
HP: Didn’t he offer you a snack or something?
JH: He brought a plate of cookies and we ate cookies, which is a little annoying because during the interview they’d be chewing.
HP: What kind of biscuits are we talking here?
JH: My memory is they were chocolate chip cookies… And then he played some instruments for me and showed me some classic instruments. He has the bass that Elvis’s bass player used on all the Sun recordings. He played it and he sang for me. All these unbelievable things that leave your jaw hanging down.
HP: Did you tell him about your indie rock days in Carolina?
JH: I certainly did not. But I’ll tell you what I did tell him that opened up the conversation. I was like, “I just want to tell you, since I have been here, Paul McCartney, how much I love Ram. It’s one of my favorite records of all time, and it’s my favorite post-Beatles Beatles record.” And I said, “I just want to tell you, a friend of mine had it – an eccentric friend of mine, who had a quadraphonic reel-to-reel setup, which is four speakers – and he had Ram and he played it for me and it blew my mind. I realized how unbelievably great that record is.” And he goes, “Oh, wow, yeah.” But he said he had very mixed feelings about that record because he made it at a time that was very hard for him, and he had negative emotional feelings about that time, although he said his nephew kept trying to tell him how great it was, and that he was starting to come around to it, which I thought was funny.
And it was after learning that I was a total nerd, and was actually listening to his records on reel-to-reel that he realized “Oh, I should take to this guy around my studio. He’s going to love all this bullshit.” Next thing you know, he’s showing me the reel-to-reel machine that they recorded Sgt. Pepper’s on. I have a video of him telling me how it works. I was geeking out with him, and he’s a geek as it turns out. He just wanted to talk about this nerdy stuff and I was right there with him.
When I got back to London, I went to visit my friend Danny Haytham (Haygam??), who was in the New York Times bureau of London. We were having dinner with his family, and my wife was there, and they said when I walked in the door I was floating off the ground. And they said, “Let us touch you. Let us touch you. Because you hugged Paul McCartney.”
HP: You’re hugging Paul McCartney! Did he smell good?
JH: I just remember being a little bit shocked that it was happening. And it was happening because of this whole anecdote about how John Lennon had hugged him. That had come up in our interview. He told this story about how after they had been broken up and had lawsuits and contention, they finally got back together, John Lennon hugged him. John Lennon used to say, “Touching is good.” The idea was that it was OK to do it, that they were men of a new generation and could do it. So when we were departing, I said goodbye to him to go to the train station. I was prepared to shake his hand and then he reached out and hugged me, and when we leaned back, there was this moment of recognition between us before he even said it. I knew what he was going to say, and then he said it.
“Touching is good.”