RAVER: Happy Birthday, Gloria Stavers!
Dubbed “the Mother Superior of the Inferior” by the Saturday Evening Post in 1967, Gloria Stavers didn’t just revolutionize rock journalism — she created it. If that seems like a broad and bold statement, it’s because it is. But it’s also true. Yesterday would have been Stavers’ 87th birthday, and today, we pay homage to a woman without whom there’d be no REBEAT, yes, but also a huge, gaping hole in music history.
First hired by 16 magazine in 1958 as a mail and subscription clerk, the pleading words of fans resonated with Stavers, and she vowed to provide them with a new kind of content that catered to their questions — the kinds of questions girls up to the age of 16 might ask their idols. She, personally, developed the often “wiggy” questionnaires served to the stars, along with producing much of the gossip, along with many of the features and photographs, herself. (Not to mention basically inventing a new, colloquial language.) Within a year, she became editor-in-chief, a position she held for the next 17.
During the ’60s, Stavers was a tastemaker, a role model, and a gateway to the big and beautiful world of the stars. Her readers looked to her for everything cool and hip on the horizon, as well as the desperate answer to whether their “fave rave” was married or not. Featuring a lengthy “mailbag” section, Stavers often printed fans’ photos and quelled rumors herself.
Though she was 30 years old in 1967, when 16‘s readership hit 12 million, she claimed she had “a button in her head” that she could push and “become 13 again.” That perspective — and the very fact that she even acknowledged that it was a valid perspective — gave 16 a voice that, as the magazine proclaimed, was “often imitated,” but never really duplicated.
On the flip side, artists and their representatives clambered for her attention, often measuring the success of their campaigns in the number of pages they received in 16. It’s been said that Bob Dylan himself, the most un-16 guy to ever exist, would call Stavers and play her songs, just to get her reaction. Stavers’ fingerprints were all over the ’60s. For rock historians, she preserved the goings-on of notables, and, aside from the trite “favorite color” and “dream date” queries, asked probing questions that dug deeper than record bins ever could.
This column is titled “RAVER” in tribute to Gloria Stavers, as her readers were sometimes referred to as “Stavers’ Ravers.” I began collecting ’60s magazines seriously around 10 years ago, but it wasn’t until I started writing and interviewing some of the artists within their pages that Stavers and her ingenious vision hit me. On the surface, it’s easy to dismiss 16 as a teenybopper rag; after all, it published the letters of little girls who really and truly believed they were going to marry Paul McCartney. But, actually, these magazines are bonafide historical documents.
I was always a bit skeptical of some of the features. How much of it was hyperbole, or completely made up altogether? Paul Revere and the Raiders (pictured with Stavers above in 16‘s February 1967 issue) were darlings of Stavers and her readers. Countless words were devoted to Mark Lindsay and the band, including some rather unbelievable stories. I’d read two about Phil “Fang” Volk (far left) that, to me, just seemed completely falsified: in one, he’d raised a gigantic zucchini as a kid and won a prize at a county fair. (Yes, there was an entire article devoted to the zucchini.) In the other, he recounted a dramatic tale of almost being kidnapped as a child, his mother swooping in at the very last second to save him.
When I interviewed Volk in 2011, I brought up both of these stories, with the full disclosure that I was merely trying to verify them. The zucchini one: true. The kidnapping one: surprisingly also true. Volk remembered in vivid and horrifying detail the man who tried to lure him into the back seat of his car, where a young “Fang” glimpsed all the trapping of a movie kidnapping: rope, candy — and an ax. His mother spotted him from the kitchen window and ran outside just in the nick of time. This is all 100% true.
(Though not as intense, I also asked Jeremy Clyde about a pet squirrel he mentioned in 16, which, you’ll be glad to know, is also true.)
So, believe it, friends, even the craziest, dumbest stuff within the pages of 16 is, more than likely, completely verifiable. Between the unique and exclusive content and the often-candid photographs, Stavers gave her readers an unprecedented look into the lives of stars that, for previous generations, were almost solely untouchable and enigmatic. She made ’60s celebrities real; she made them human.
At the same time, Stavers realized her platform and used it to market to one of the most economically powerful teenage generations of all time. The sheer number of consumer goods associated with the acts she covered never went ignored, and 16 sought to cash in, with “100 Wild Intimate Pix” photo books, posters, clothing, stationary, and so much more. She also took readers on “A Trip to Dreamsville,” where they could win signed merchandise and records, and even go on a date with Mark Lindsay or win Micky Dolenz‘s private phone number. Through even the mere thought of these experiences, she bridged the gap between fan and artist. Suddenly, it didn’t seem so impossible to meet Sonny and Cher — they were answering readers’ letters every month.
But, with all that aside, one of Stavers’ greatest attributes was the championing of young girls. Every year, 16 invited female readers to send in photographs of themselves for the Miss 16 pageant. What could have merely been another ploy to exploit kids or praise these impressionable young women for their looks alone, was, to Stavers, an opportunity to inspire readers. Pageant winners would receive “their weight in silver dollars,” like Beverly in the January 1965 issue below — for a college scholarship. Even runners-up received savings bonds for school.
The emphasis she always seemed to place on the future is what made her a different kind of an editor (aside from being a woman in a mostly male-dominated field). Whether that future was college, or next month’s new records, or even growing up to marry a Beatle — it all seemed possible when the ink flowed from her pen. And, without her, we’d be lacking in some of the most colorful and laughably thorough journalism of the ’60s — and we sure as hell wouldn’t know anything about Herman’s “toof.”
(Cover photo of Davy Jones and Gloria Stavers from 16, April 1967.)
