A Style Is Born: Ten Years of Rolling Stone

What can a poor boy do but sing in a rockroll band?
— THE ROLLING STONES

Q: What are you rebelling against?
A: Whaddya got?
— Reply originally attributed to ELVIS which, if he didn’t say, he meant to

Taken at once, ten years of rock & roll as reported by ROLLING STONE is too big a pill to swallow. I sat up all last night rereading 248 issues: John Lennon on the cover of No. 1 and Elvis on the cover of No. 248. Everything that has gone on in between came back in a tidal wave of memories almost too overwhelming to sort out. The past ten years should have taken thirty to pass, so abrupt and lasting were the developments; and during that time rock & roll became irretrievably intertwined with almost everything happening in this country.

I will never forget the first glimpse I got of ROLLING STONE. I was in the Navy and my buddies and I had discovered dope and RS at about the same time: We sat out on the fantail of a Navy destroyer, smoking and reading the first issue and marveling that finally there was a magazine which covered everything we were interested in. I wrote Jann Wenner a letter gushing over that, and damn him if he didn’t keep it. He hired me anyway and he still hauls that letter out now and then to keep me in line. I was sincere, though; RS was, as Ralph Gleason once said, like a “letter from home.” A transitory home, a home for the soul, a storehouse of everything meaningful to me. Music was and still is the starting point (proving the old analogy that what you like to listen to forms the soundtrack to your life) but that encompasses one hell of a lot. That’s the reason for ROLLING STONE’s existence.

RS has — from the first — covered events and personalities that are not always a purist’s idea of rock & roll. What the purists forget is that “rock & roll” means much more than just the music. Anyone who ever took those words to heart knows that; knows that there are books and movies and people and events and attitudes that matter more to a rock & roll way of life than do many records that are labeled rock & roll. Jack Kerouac was rock & roll; Bobby Rydell was not. Tom Robbins is rock & roll; Andy Gibb is not. Star Wars is rock & roll; A Star Is Born is not.

One of the times I was proudest of RS was that week in October of 1975 when Bruce Springsteen was simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek, while Patty Hearst graced the cover of ROLLING STONE. That’s not to denigrate Springsteen’s talent but that week ROLLING STONE had the story that mattered. That story meant and said more about what was happening in America than those two Springsteen biographies; said more about the strange undercurrents that fuel America. (“Everything you want they got right here in the U.S.A.,” sang Chuck Berry, and he was right on target.)

Ten years of ROLLING STONE is the best history of the past ten years in America that I can think of. Consider the mix of early RS “rock & roll” cover stories: Sun Ra, the underground press, drug use in the armed services, Elvis, the MC5, Zabriskie Point, Altamont, rock groupies, Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago trial, Nudie, Jean-Luc Godard, Miles Davis, Sly Stone, Chuck Berry, Captain Beefheart. That mix has continued: Gene Autry, Dan Ellsberg, Nicholas Johnson, Senator Sam Ervin, Charles Manson, OJ Simpson, Muhammad Ali, Stones, Dylan, Beatles, Elton John and Johnny Rotten.

At this very minute, I can hear two other typewriters rattling away: Carl Bernstein is in the next office writing about the CIA and next door to him John Swenson is hammering out a story on a near breakup of the Beach Boys. Both stories mean a great deal here, and that kind of mixture of subjects under the umbrella of rock & roll is exactly what ROLLING STONE is about.

One of our best issues was “Let It Bleed,” exhaustive coverage of the disastrous Rolling Stones concert at Altamont. Equally important, however, to the rock & roll audience was the “Most Dangerous Man Alive” issue: the first thorough story on Charles Manson. Those two issues won us the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism National Magazine Award: Rock & roll journalism was finally recognized by the outside world. (Only three years earlier, in 1968, street vendors were arrested for selling the issue with John and Yoko nude on the cover.)

The growth of rock & roll journalism, which paralleled the growth of rock & roll, is a fascinating subject in itself (in fact, I even wrote my master’s thesis on it). Nowhere has it been practiced better than in ROLLING STONE, whether it be Hunter Thompson (whose own prose style reads like the sound of rock ranting and raving) or Jon Landau patiently explaining things. Or Woodstock, which is a good case in point. The daily newspapers and wire services — which are conditioned to rely upon “official sources” — reported that the festival was a total disaster. Greil Marcus came back with excellent on-the-scene coverage for RS, which proved that it was not anything like a disaster. Nowhere have I seen better proof that “official” reporting is not necessarily truthful. The regular press felt that the chief of police of Bethel, New York, was the authority to consult; ROLLING STONE went into the field.

If there was any one guideline to rock & roll journalism, it was written by Bob Dylan: “Don’t follow leaders.”

Ten years of rock & roll history as covered by ROLLING STONE is exactly as I lived and remember the past ten years: a lot of Fifties hangover, a brief spurt of authentic Sixties identity, a long Sixties hangover, followed by a great leap into uncertainty.