Rolling Stone

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Rolling Stone

Almost two years before the Saturday Evening Post —"America's magazine"—first folded in 1969, a small magazine named Rolling Stone began in a San Francisco print shop. With the look of an underground newspaper, Rolling Stone targeted a young readership that was attuned to the counterculture. Whereas the Post conveyed a consensus within American culture, Rolling Stone had more in common with Playboy's approach as the embodiment of a particular lifestyle. At its height, Rolling Stone's cover became an icon in itself—for many, it served as a cultural barometer. At different points in its history, the biweekly had been regarded as a daring anti-establishment voice, or a slick mainstream media product. The magazine's one main constant was its music coverage. Rolling Stone deemed rock musicians and their music to be newsworthy, which helped to legitimize one of the key elements of 1960s' oppositional culture. The inception of Rolling Stone marked the changes in U.S. culture following the 1960s: one such change held that the personal—one's lifestyle, even the kind of music one listened to—is political.

Jann Wenner, editor and publisher, was a 21-year-old dropout from Berkeley when he began Rolling Stone with only $7500 in borrowed capital. " Rolling Stone is not just about music," wrote Wenner in the inaugural issue, "but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces." The magazine's name was taken from a song, by blues legend Muddy Waters, that borrowed its title from an old proverb: "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Rolling Stone's look—newsprint on a quarterfold format—was of an underground newspaper, although that was the furthest thing from Wenner's mind. The intention from the beginning was to make the magazine look as professional as possible, with column rules and Times Roman type. Wenner, who derisively referred to "the hippie press," wanted to be as legitimate as Time magazine. Despite Wenner's efforts, outsiders saw Rolling Stone as part of the underground press, a perception that lasted into the 1970s.

The magazine took its slogan, "All the News That Fits," from the New York Times ' "All the News That's Fit to Print"—it was a facetious swipe and a description of the limitless space allotted to Rolling Stone's writers. The magazine's focus on music as a news-worthy topic distinguished it from any other publication before it. Its interviews with musicians (later to include actors, politicians, and other celebrities) went beyond the fan magazine's interest in personal likes and dislikes, and probed the creative processes behind the music instead. One of the magazine's early record critics, Greil Marcus, declared in Robert Anson's Gone Crazy and Back Again : "I am no more capable of mulling over Elvis without thinking of Herman Melville, than I am of reading Jonathan Edwards without putting on Robert Johnson's records as background music."

After barely getting off the ground—the first issue had a press run of 40,000 copies where all but 6000 of them were returned—the magazine had a circulation of 325,000 by 1974, a figure that reached 1.25 million in 1998. Along the way, the magazine dropped its quarterfold format for a regular tabloid style and four color. In 1974, 16 percent of its readership was over 25 with a median age of 21. By the end of the 1990s, its original audience was older and more like yuppies. Once a necessity to young Americans, the 1990s Rolling Stone faced heavy competition from other music magazines and MTV.

Wenner, dubbed the "hip capitalist" by journalist Robert Draper, once offered the early subscription incentive of a free roach clip (to hold marijuana joints). Hip promotion aside, the magazine's steadily gaining reputation for publishing "some remarkably good report-age," as the New York Times was forced to admit in 1973, was what gave Rolling Stone its foothold. Wenner's magazine thrived on reporting the cultural events of the late 1960s for which it seemed best suited. While mainstream newspapers condemned the tribal goings-on at the Woodstock festival, Rolling Stone reported that the festival crowd temporarily constituted New York State's third-largest city and successfully policed itself. When 1969's Altamont festival self-destructed into violence, Rolling Stone weighed in with the headline, "Let It Bleed," and assigned blame to anyone even remotely involved with the festival. Its hard-hitting reporting of Altamont was in sharp contrast to the establishment press that lazily reported facts and figures: how long the traffic jam was, and the estimated crowd, all the while giving no impression of the orgy of violence that ensued there.

Somehow, the optimistic possibilities, ahead of the magazine in the late 1960s, dissipated as it entered the 1970s. The shootings at Kent State in 1970 provoked many on the staff to steer the magazine towards more political coverage. Wenner fought off the revolt and insisted the magazine remain focused on music, which resulted in several resignations. This was problematic because rock music also limped into the 1970s. Many of rock's new legends—like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin—were either dead, or else they were defunct like the Beatles. As rock critic Jon Landau expressed it, as quoted from a 1974 New York Times book review: "Bob Dylan has lost much of his impact … the end of the Beatles as a group is now irreversible … there are no longer any superhumans to focus on."

Enter Hunter Thompson, the iconoclastic writer who became a celebrity through the magazine's pages. Thompson, the "Gonzo Journalist," practiced a bombastic style of writing that pushed aside objectivity, and forced the writer into the stories he covered. Thompson was a cultural outlaw: open about his drug abuse and alcohol consumption, his prose could be gifted in its insights on one page and babbling nonsense on the next. The writer who once wrote that President Richard Nixon had "the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad," managed to find himself, during the 1968 campaign, with the president in Nixon's limousine, where they talked about football. It was the kind of inconceivable situation that endeared Thompson to Rolling Stone's readers. Issues that carried Thompson's installments of his infamous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, sold out quickly. Soon Thompson was covering the 1972 presidential election for the magazine, which was beginning to display a unique ability to transfer rock-and-roll panache to more sober pursuits, like literature and politics.

Rolling Stone quietly became a literate magazine that happened to cover music. More influential celebrities were granting lengthy interviews, like the ones that had been popularized in Playboy. The magazine's literary credentials were further established by the appearance of authors Tom Wolfe and Truman Capote; Richard Goodwin, former speechwriter for John F. Kennedy, helped to give it political cachet. It won the 1970 National Magazine Award for its pieces on Altamont and Charles Manson. Now recognized for challenging its readers' assumptions, Rolling Stone had the envious ability to cover stories in ways that major newspapers couldn't, or wouldn't.

Rolling Stone's breakthrough followed in 1975, after being contacted by a San Francisco attorney who claimed he provided refuge for fugitive Patty Hearst, the kidnapped newspaper-chain heiress. "The Inside Story," as the article was titled, scooped the major media outlets on what was an intensely followed story. It was widely recognized that Rolling Stone's Patty Hearst story was the biggest journalistic event since the New York Times printed the Pentagon Papers five years before.

Perhaps the magazine's toughest critics were its readers and its staff; every decision, from the changes in format, to the kind of advertising Rolling Stone accepted, was subjected to active debate. According to Draper, it was simply that " Rolling Stone's staffers wanted nothing so much as to set a good example for their peers. When they did not, their readers cried 'sellout'—a charge that perhaps no other magazine had ever yet faced." After Rolling Stone's move to New York in 1977, the magazine's culture was altered. Bit by bit, the look and content steered towards more market-driven concerns—Wenner was eager to shake the magazine's hippie image in pursuit of mainstream success. The fragmented music scene and the aging readership helped to underscore the editorial drift that ensued. The magazine, once a haven for writers escaping the establishment press, was put in the unusual position of watching its writers defect to the mainstream press.

"Few things sound less glamorous," proclaimed Louis Menand in a 1991 New Republic piece, "than 'the counterculture'—a term many people are likely to associate with Charles Manson." Rolling Stone's constituency had changed. Faced with competition from other music magazines, like Spin (alternative music) and Vibe (hip-hop/rap), the 1990s presented the challenge of a young audience who could get their music news without having to read Rolling Stone. The magazine responded by increasing its content towards fashion and technology. Out of touch with even its core topic, Rolling Stone gave covers to major 1980s rock acts like U2 and Talking Heads behind Time and Newsweek. "Yet this was where the magazine found itself at the close of the eighties," Draper's book concluded: "respected but no longer relied upon, a force among other forces—an institution, surely, and like many such institutions, disregarded."

—Daryl Umberger