Closing the Coronet
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The alderman in question is Art Newman. The Coronet isn’t in Newman’s ward, but he says he saw people taking wine into the theater seating area at the Ramsey Lewis show –a no-no, because Schuba’s license allows drinking in the lobby only. The club was cited for a liquor infraction.
For his part, Newman dismisses Schuba’s charges as a “smokescreen” and says, “If Mr. Schuba is deciding to shut down because he cannot make money under the liquor license he applied for, that’s his business.”
During his tenure, Rolling Stone got better: he signaled his intention with an early cover of Neneh Cherry, an unprecedented elevation of a noncrossover female black artist. Fricke also points to the Rolling Stone interview with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and the magazine’s refreshingly unexpected lead review of a handful of avant-garde jazz albums as other evidence of what he tried to do. “When I started reading Rolling Stone, they were putting people like Sun Ra and the MC5 on the cover. I don’t think that what we were doing was all that much in left field,” says Fricke.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Randy Tunnell.
