Guitar Player magazine again.

I just finished reading the interviews on rockcritics.com with various Guitar Player principals, including Jim Crockett, Tom Mulhern, Tom Wheeler, Joe Gore, Steven Rosen, James Rotondi and Michael Molenda, the current editor. I'd love to hear from Bud Eastman, the creator of the magazine back in 1967. But all of these men have something interesting to recount about their time working on the magazine. Each seems to have their own version of Guitar Player's so-called golden age, as is to be expected when reminiscences are on the menu.

I was surprised by the rancor shown in reader comments, if not a little from the commentators, towards Michael Molenda. Molenda defends himself by pointing to the increasing subscriptions and newsstand sales, and Guitar Player is navigating the choppy waters of the print magazine business admirably. But for some, something has been lost in Guitar Player's change of ownership to large corporations heavily focused on the bottom line and thus encouraging a low-risk editorial policy.

I still buy the magazine from time to time and I think that aside from some clearly commercial cover story choices (the Matthew Bellamy cover this month has inspired some criticism on GP's Facebook page) the content is still reasonably diversified and the writing and editing are still of high quality.  To an extent, I don't really care who's on the cover - my favorite parts of the magazine are the fiddly bits in between the big articles - the lessons, the gear reviews, the spectacular (and sometimes spectacularly odd) advertisements. I can't imagine a time when I'll never pick up an issue.