20 Years of Rolling Stone
Wenner, Jann S.
E in the noisily immodest maga- 1-2 3 zine trade, Rolling Stone has always stood out as a beacon of narcissism. To commemorate its founding, editor and publisher Jann S. Wenner likes to plaster...
...The 42-year-old Wenner, a famous egotist and son of a baby-food magnate, has always been quite public about his greed...
...The very Wolfean "Funky Chic," a meandering follow-up to his famous "Radical Chic" essay, is also included, though memorable only for a long digression on the importance of fashion to history and literature...
...Like the generation it set out to tap, Wenner's organ has gone from yippie to yuppie without missing a backbeat...
...After all, they buy magazines too...
...Even the thoughts extracted from the few semi-literate rock icons (Pete Townsend or John Lennon) boil down to something along the lines of: "Get off my back...
...started reading the Stone in college and just haven't gotten around to cancelling their subscriptions yet...
...From Eternity to Here," Charles Perry's addled Haight-Ashbury piece reads like the reverie of a recovering psychedeliac, but at least it's in on "the scene...
...It was also probably the magazine's last brush with anything remotely unpredictable or avant-garde...
...Hunter S. Thompson was the prime mover, the Olympian presence, behind this movement, and he still casts a long shadow over the often-unreadable prose of his would-be successors...
...It's on this front that the magazine takes itself most seriously and where it most transparently reveals its rather fascinating devolution, from obscure object of worship to mass-market subject of ridicule...
...Citizen Wenner immediately prostrated himself in apology to offended Asian-Americans...
...The magazine's average consumers are 25, male and earn $30,000 a year, i.e., beer-breathing fraternity dudes who Richard Mann is television critic for the Washington Times...
...They believed that too...
...But when Rolling Stone pastes Eddie Murphy's face on the cover and drools over him for ten or twenty pages inside, the embarrassing thing is that they're invariably the last members of the press at large to do it...
...Annie Liebovitz and Richard Avedon shoot the pretty pictures: the rest is filler, a bland affirmation of conventional wisdom...
...T he sober, liberal pieties of William 1 Greider and Frances FitzGerald have replaced the old Gonzo politics of Hunter Thompson at the National Affairs desk...
...Two Thompson classics appear in this book: an early account of his involvement in "freak power" politics in Aspen, and a 1983 report on the amazingly lurid Pulitzer divorce trial in Palm Beach where "price tags mean nothing...
...Just listen to the late Sid Vicious holding forth on his fellow Pistol Johnny Rotten: 'E was the vilest geezer I ever met—all misshapen, no 'air, 'unch-back, flat feet...
...In the process, Rolling Stone has, to coin the phrase, "gathered moss," mostly in the form of sycophantic celebrity interviews, odious "lifestyle" reportage, and miles of glistening technicolor advertising, which in the phone-book sized twentieth-anniversary issue sold for $35,745 a page...
...E used to tell people 'e 'ad to cut 'is piles off with a razor blade because they were 'anging out 'is pants, and they'd believe 'im...
...Not that there's anything evil in turning a profit...
...The book attempts something quite different: a compendium of journalism, surveying the Rolling Stone canon from Steppenwolf to Tom Wolfe...
...That he is, if you define "hip capitalist" as someone who dispenses liberal politics from the back of a limousine, with one hand throttling a magnum of Mumm's, the other balancing a cigar-sized line of cocaine...
...The Rolling Stone Interview" they have always been called, the ostentatious definite article suggesting that there never had been another published dialogue with said superstar and never would be...
...To commemorate its founding, editor and publisher Jann S. Wenner likes to plaster huge Roman numerals on the magazine cover, in the manner of the defunct rock group Chicago...
...Much of this collection, like the magazine, consists of interviews...
...This last jubilee was marked by a tedious television special and a lavish coffee table book, 20 Years of Rolling Stone: What a Long Strange 711p It's Been...
...Wenner also had the wit and foresight to assign "Doctor" Thompson to the National Affairs desk, from where he reported on political events, eventually producing Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72...
...20 YEARS OF ROLLING STONE: WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP IT'S BEEN Edited by Jann S. Wenner/Friendly Press/$24.95 Richard Marin THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1988 43...
...estimated readership is seven times that number...
...The magazine came along just as the New Journalism was metamorphosing into the newer breed called Gonzo...
...First came Rolling Stonus X in 1977, then last year XX—both issues fat with self-reflection and self-congratulation...
...It's this caliber of gibberish he insists on spouting in the introduction to 20 Years of Rolling Stone: flatulent assertions about "the press at large," "digging for the truth," and "above-all, not shrinking from saying what we think and telling it like it is...
...That sort of primitive British prole-speak has become de rigeur these days, but in 1977 (when Fleetwood Mac was still considered pretty "far out"), it was a bloody revelation...
...E used to tell them that niggers 'ad 'air on the roof of their mouths...
...a rude encounter with the Sex Pistols at the dawn of punk...
...Instead of one of those "Right Stuff' segments, this collection opts for a chapter from The Bonfire of the Vanities, the novel Wolfe serialized in the magazine then drastically rewrote for publication in book form...
...Capitalizing on the drift, it offered a forum where writers could hold forth on sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll without fear of a blue pencil...
...That would explain the Diana Vreeland profile a few months ago...
...Everybody 'ated me...
...beyond mere musical, pop-cultural commentary to the "heavier" realm of social criticism...
...But like the Village Voice, nobody really reads it anymore, least of all aging radicals or baby boomers...
...But the only other writer of Olympian stature the magazine can lay claim to is Tom Wolfe...
...When O'Rourke—a humorist—wrote in a February report from Seoul that Koreans "do all look alike," he raised a considerable amount of ethnic ire here...
...It's an ancient complaint that Rolling Stone has become a complacent old fart of a rag...
...And yet extracting a complete sentence from the likes of Keith Moon, Sly Stone, Marlon Brando, or Bob Dylan inevitably proves nearly impossible...
...Numbers like that make it glaringly clear why a magazine that once offered a free roach clip to every new subscriber now has a drug testing policy for its staffers...
...From high atop his palatial Manhattan offices (three floors on Fifth Avenue, opposite the Plaza Hotel), Citizen Wenner—as Jann (pronounced yawn) is sometimes called—presides over 125 full-time employees and a publishing venture that, if put on the block, could reportedly command as much as $150 million...
...The statistics speak volumes: The inaugural issue, published November 9, 1967, sold 4,000 copies...
...We do learn that Sting is conceited, Springsteen earnest, and Michael Jackson very strange...
...And except for mischievous flashes from its "irrational affairs" correspondent, P. J. O'Rourke, Rolling Stone has become a Life magazine for the MTV set...
...Let there be no doubt: the business of Rolling Stone is business...
...Writers like Timothy Crouse and Charles M. Young have also set themselves apart from the stable of star-struck paparazzi and pompous rock critics (former head shop-owner Greil Marcus heads that list) that Wenner has cultivated over the years...
...But then, we knew that already, didn't we...
...The most interesting interviews, not surprisingly, come not in the moronic one-on-ones but inside the better articles: a session with Charles Manson at the time of his trial...
...As ridiculous as many of the early Rolling Stone pieces were, at least they were bulletins from the frontier of something new...
...No, what's so grating and false about him (and most of his writers) is his absurd claim that his magazine is "the repository, the written record of our time...
...His brilliant drug-frenzied farce, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, first saw light in Rolling Stone...
...To be fair, Rolling Stone has published some of the best contemporary journalists and many of their better pieces are reproduced in the twentieth-anniversary book (though often crudely truncated by Wenner's editorialhacksaw...
...A former staff writer called him "the ultimate hip capitalist...
...Rolling Stone has always prided itself on its tete-a-tetes with the gurus of pop...
...The TV show, a shallow video-clip retrospective, was merely an attempt by the magazine to snatch some credit for the two decades of music history that happened to coincide with its publication...
...Wolfe reportedly got a cool $100,000 for a four-part series titled: "Post-Orbital Remorse: The Brotherhood of the Right Stuff," the story that became the book that catapulted him to superstardom...
...At least this was the image fostered by Wenner's portrayal of himself in the movie Perfect...
...Everybody 'ated 'im...
...We 'ated each other, too, but nobody else would talk to us, so we'd just get drunk and criticize each other...
...Now circulation is 1.1 million...
...Rolling Stone's connection with the current subculture is so remote that Spin, a rival rock 'zine, met instant success when it was founded three years ago by Penthouse heir Bob Guccione, Jr...
...and the rich are always in heat, where pampered animals are openly worshiped in church and naked millionaires gnaw brassieres off the chests of their own daughters in public...
Vol. 21 • April 1988 • No. 4
