Revolver (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Revolver magazine was born twice. The first time was in the spring of 2000, with a Jim Morrison cover and a tagline that promised to be "The World's Most Wanted Music Magazine." It sold poorly, ran for five issues, and died quietly with its May/June 2001 edition. The second time it was born, it came back louder. What drove two editors from Guitar World to launch a new magazine? Why did it fail so quickly? And what made the same publisher decide to try again, this time with a harder sound and a narrower focus? The answers reach back to an intern hired in 1993, a debate about classic rock versus metal, and a calculated bet that heavy music could support a print magazine where glossier ambitions had failed.

• 2. Two Editors, One Idea

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  Tom Beaujour joined Guitar World as an intern in 1993, hired by Brad Tolinski. He rose to managing editor before walking out on the 1st of January 1998 to tour with a band. A year later, the band behind him, Beaujour came back to Guitar World as a freelancer for Tolinski, and the two started talking about what would become Revolver. Their model was Mojo, the British music monthly, and their aim was to build an American equivalent. Beaujour described Harris Publications' backing of the project as a legitimate reward for what Tolinski had done for the company. By turning Guitar World into a successful title, Tolinski had, in Beaujour's words, taken Harris "from a ghetto place that did crossword puzzle books to a serious business."

• 3. The First Run and Its Collapse

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  That first Jim Morrison launch issue carried real ambition, but the magazine struggled from the start. Harris cancelled it after five issues, with Beaujour and Tolinski later pointing to two problems: a lack of editorial direction and the costs of the writers they had assembled. Harris, though, liked the name too much to simply let it go. The publisher floated the idea of turning Revolver into a quarterly classic rock title. Tolinski pushed back hard, arguing for heavy metal on the grounds that it would be cheaper to cover and would attract a more focused readership. Beaujour put the logic plainly: "Classic rock is starting to falter in the newsstand world. We learned that at Revolver and at Guitar World. So we decided to make it metal." Once the new direction was settled, Tolinski left the magazine, and Beaujour moved from executive editor to editor-in-chief.

• 4. The Relaunch That Sold

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  The relaunched Revolver hit newsstands with its September/October 2001 issue, this time featuring Slipknot on the cover and a new tagline: "The World's Loudest Rock Magazine." The shift worked. Beaujour's summary was brief and satisfied: "It sold. It sold well." Pantera and Hellyeah drummer Vinnie Paul joined the magazine in 2001 and wrote an advice column there for fifteen years, until 2016. Lacuna Coil vocalist Cristina Scabbia began her own advice column in 2005, a role she credited to Lamb of God vocalist Randy Blythe.

• 5. Ownership Changes

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  In March 2006, Harris Publications sold Revolver to Future US, Inc. for four million dollars. At the time of that sale, the magazine was generating gross profits of five hundred thousand dollars on a turnover of three point seven million dollars. Six years later, in 2012, Future plc sold Revolver to NewBay Media. Then in May 2017, Project M Group LLC purchased the magazine, and by the fall of that year had launched a brand relaunch covering both the print edition and the website, framed around the art and culture of heavy music.

• 6. The Hottest Chicks Controversy

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  Tom Beaujour conceived a feature in 2006 called "The 13 Sexiest Chicks in Metal," the first edition of what would become an annual franchise running under the banner "Hottest Chicks in Hard Rock" until 2017. That first issue in March 2006 became the second best-selling issue in the magazine's history, trailing only the March 2005 Dimebag Darrell tribute issue. Metal Edge and Decibel both produced their own one-off issues covering women in metal in response. In February 2010, Arch Enemy vocalist Angela Gossow, who had appeared in the feature, called it "an embarrassment for female musicians, who actually are musicians," specifically objecting to an image used without her approval in the 2010 edition. Editor Brandon Geist, responding to ongoing criticism in 2011, argued that the women appeared voluntarily, and that critics were being "extremely condescending to the women involved to act as if YOU know better than they do what is right for THEM." Kim Kelly, writing for The Atlantic, characterized Geist's argument as avoiding and trivializing the concern his critics had actually raised. The feature ran its final edition in the April/May 2017 issue, discontinued after Project M Group's acquisition.

• 7. The Golden Gods

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  Revolver established the Epiphone Revolver Golden Gods Music Awards in 2009 as an annual ceremony recognizing figures in heavy music. Originally named the Revolver Golden God Awards, the event went on hiatus in 2015 before returning in 2016. One early category, the "Hottest Chick in Metal" award, was retired in 2011, the same year the magazine's feature changed its name from "Hottest Chicks in Metal" to "Hottest Chicks in Hard Rock."