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Rolling Stone gathers no Marx
BY DAVID WEIR | So Rolling Stone is over 30. It was only 4 when I arrived in San Francisco, in late 1971, to help start a magazine called SunDance. The magazine -- like Rolling Stone and a dozen other San Francisco magazines of that period -- sought to combine politics and culture, with columnists like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and young investigative reporters like Bob Scheer and Jeff Gerth. Like Rolling Stone, it featured psychedelic design, original artwork and evocative writing. Less than a year later, SunDance was dead. Soon, all the other San Francisco rags went down, too, until only one was left standing: Rolling Stone. A quarter-century later, to people of my generation, Rolling Stone is now the missing link, one of the few evolutionary threads that connect back to a time of incredible media start-up ferment. In the beginning, Rolling Stone was most definitely for radical hippies. Culture and politics had converged, forming a new world, and a new generation found its voice in that convergence -- original, rebellious, irrepressible. Editor in Chief Jann Wenner's first column in the premier issue referred somewhat obliquely to that spirit: "Rolling Stone is not just about music, but also about the things and attitudes that the music embraces." As the Vietnam War wound down, however, the politics assumed a distant second position at the magazine, and pop culture took command. My own years there ('74-77) were part of the end game of the political era, as well as the end game for San Francisco as home base. We had terrific political coverage in those years, by writers like Joe Klein, David Harris, Tom Hayden, Joe Eszterhas, Lowell Bergman, Howard Kohn and of course Hunter Thompson. But with a few notable exceptions, this work was overwhelmed by coverage of '60s culture, especially the culture of rock 'n' roll. RS's non-entertainment covers were more numerous in the first decade, but they still stood out as exceptions to the rule. Howard Kohn and I co-authored several 20,000-word chapters chronicling heiress Patty Hearst's years underground after she was kidnapped and converted by the band of self-styled "revolutionary" bandits who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. Wenner headlined our series "The Inside Story." But even our stories, written in a sort of breathless narrative style that emphasized drama over pith, fit neatly into the newly developing mass underground journalism. Most of us did more substantive work as well, on environmental, social justice or organized crime issues, for example, or mysterious deaths on Indian reservations and in inner cities. But pieces on these subjects turned out to be dinosaurs at the end of an era in American journalism, rather than precursors to a new golden age of investigative reporting. It wasn't long before the media landscape was transformed to embrace MTV, ubiquitous celebrity covers, Tina Brown's New Yorker and "content" rather than writing. Rolling Stone helped forge a new social (and non-political) consensus in the '70s and '80s, pulling the edges of Hollywood and TV into the mainstream, harnessing the binding curve of music to establish the iconic language of the times. In the case of our most famous colleague, Hunter Thompson, it wasn't even the media that was the message any longer, but the mediator himself. It's hard to remember, but journalists had not been stars before then. Suddenly we were all stars, of some shape or size or degree of brightness or another. But that didn't mean the market necessarily wanted the stories we had actually set out to tell. Wenner refers to his own "left-wing instincts" in his introduction to "Rolling Stone: The Complete Covers, 1967-1997," and explains that he has "always wanted to give (his) generation a voice in public affairs." In the years I worked with Wenner, it was always striking to me how much more radical he was, instinctively, than most of the rest of his editorial staff. One of the keys to Wenner's success, however, turned out to be his ability to suppress his political instincts when they didn't resonate with the mass audience. It is 20 years since Wenner packed up shop from what is now Multimedia Gulch in San Francisco and moved cross-country to Park Avenue. He renounced the Bay Area as a "media backwater." In the move, he left the "radical" vestige of the "radical-hippies" behind entirely; except for the extraordinary political writing of William Greider, Rolling Stone has, for two decades, concentrated on its core competency -- music entertainment. From this vantage, it is easy to survey the triumph of '60s culture and the collapse of '60s politics. And there is no easier way to do that than to return today to South Park, the booming center of the New Economy, and home to the old Rolling Stone headquarters at 625 Third St. Directly across from the old brick building where the Blues Brothers used to visit, and our staff collected cocaine donations for birthday presents, sits Wired Digital's office, home of another young, creative staff producing HotWired. Few members of that group were old enough to read RS when it was in this neighborhood. Today, all around are the storefront offices of other Web-based companies and multimedia production houses. There are still a few remnants of the old Rolling Stone strewn around town. Mother Jones magazine inherited the old wooden conference table (probably 11 feet long) around which Wenner plotted the cover strategies during the early '70s. In my former landlady's basement in the Haight, carefully covered with a blanket, is the huge original painting of Patty Hearst, aka Tania, as Wyeth's Christina. But in today's South Park, there are few leftists to be found. Market, not Marxist, politics reign supreme, as a new generation of content radicals attempts to create the home page for its era. At the end of his first decade, Wenner revealed what he saw as the key to RS's enduring success: "Change -- the ability to see it and live with it." The magazine's current press kits flatly proclaim that "Rolling Stone is the authority," that it provides the "most credible and authoritative coverage of popular culture in America." But there's still a lingering sense of what RS (and the generation that created it) has not been able to do: to find a way to integrate those unrealized political and civic goals into public life. What's radical today is quite different from what was radical 30 years ago, but that only adds urgency to the need to craft a new social compact. Will any of this work be done by Rolling Stone? Don't bet on it. As the late Jerry Rubin warned, just around the time RS was getting going, "Don't trust anyone over 30."
David Weir is a consultant for Salon and other publications.
"ROLLING STONE: THE COMPLETE COVERS 1967-1997"
"Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
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